Shelley Walchak of CLiC gave a great intro to blogs and blogging to an SRO crowd, and she kept right on going with the offline version of her presentation when the internet connection conked out–blog on, indeed! (You can bet that I immediately started double-checking the offline version of my presentation.)

She concentrated on Blogger, as the easiest free blog to set up. She had a good bit of advice: play around with Blogger to see how you like it, how enthusiastic you remain about continually posting new material, etc. Then if you outgrow Blogger, you will know what features to loook for in pay blogging software.

She shows the blog, Click on CLiC, that she set up for the Colorado Library Consortium. The first one to comment on it wins a book on blogging (cool idea).

Lots of questions on how to set up a multi-user Blogger site for classroom use. Lots of questions about how to enable, disable, control comments. Questions about how to set up file downloads, interest in hosting photos, other files on your blog to download. Questions about searchability of blogs, blogs vs. wikis, etc.

Seeing how many questions Shelley got about the relative basics of blogging, I started to worry about my presentation tomorrow, where I was planning to assume a certain amount of knowledge. Driving home with my colleague, Rebecca, though, she pointed out that one of the appeals of a conference is getting in a bit over your head–learning just enough in a session to get excited, go home and learn more. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow.