The Art of Blogging

If you live in the Bay Area and want to sharp­en your blog­ging skills, you may want to check out this one-day work­shop being offered in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram.

The work­shop, The Art of Blog­ging, will be held on April 21 on Stan­ford’s cam­pus, and it will be led by Tim Grieve, the pri­ma­ry writer and edi­tor of Salon.com’s War Room, one of the most wide­ly read polit­i­cal blogs in the US.

Below you can find a com­plete descrip­tion of what ground will be cov­ered, and, if you’re inter­est­ed, you can sign up here. Or, if you have any ques­tions, feel free to drop me a line since I help run Stan­ford’s pro­gram.

Work­shop Descrip­tion

Not so long ago, most of us had nev­er heard of the word “blog”. Now, it seems that almost every­one has one. But set­ting up a home page on the Inter­net doesn’t make you a suc­cess­ful blog­ger any more than buy­ing a type­writer makes you a suc­cess­ful writer. This work­shop is designed for peo­ple inter­est­ed in blog­ging not just as an out­let for cre­ativ­i­ty, but also as a way to write effec­tive­ly online and engage with a com­mu­ni­ty of read­ers.

In this one-day work­shop, we will cov­er the tech­no­log­i­cal nuts and bolts of cre­at­ing a blog, but we will focus more on how to build a blog that peo­ple actu­al­ly want to read. We will talk about and exper­i­ment with the writ­ing styles that seem to work best for blogs; we will dis­cuss ways to craft posts that attract atten­tion from oth­er blog­gers; we will talk about how to build traf­fic for a blog; and we will cov­er the eth­i­cal mores that good blog­gers fol­low and expect oth­ers to observe. Along the way, we will cre­ate our own blog, one on which par­tic­i­pants can con­tin­ue our con­ver­sa­tion long after the course is done.