The rest will follow… and it’s super easy to measure.

I do think that blogs are different than websites, generally. While, yes, blog platforms are just content management systems, traditional websites are not built for conversation. With traditional websites today (again, generally), there is no back and forth. The content is posted and that’s it until there is an update, etc. Blog posts, however, because they are an open conversation, could technically go on forever. A blog post may never actually end.

To your point about acceptance in higher education, I think that traditional websites are slowly becoming more blog-like (as far as user-generated content is concerned). Higher education does need to start getting serious about blogs and user-generated content in general. Higher education is a little slower, as usual, with this trend, though.

I do agree that student blogs can have different goals and you’re absolutely right – without goals, how can you measure success? I also love your point that in higher education “there doesn’t seem to be that much difference because very few organizations have considered the goals of their blogs beyond, ‘I want student blogs.’” I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but you’re absolutely right.

My point with the paragraph about goals was solely that blogs are about conversation and buzz and measuring this will be about the same for most student blogs, at least for now.

Student blogs are really just a sub-section of your university website and will have their own goals, but should also contribute to the goals of the university site as a whole. I should have stated this within that paragraph.

I think the main problem with measuring success with these things is that people don’t start out with goals other than having student blogs. Without goals, there’s not really a way to quantify success. I would disagree with you that most blogs have the same goals – it’s just a communications medium. Again, we need to step back and at it in its barest form – any communications medium can have thousands of different uses depending on the overall business goals of the organization. In higher ed, there doesn’t seem to be that much difference because very few institutions have considered the goals of their blogs beyond “I want student blogs”.

Your commentary on the different styles of measurement is great and definitely something that anyone starting this sort of thing needs to consider.