What are the downsides?
Because blogs are often produced and maintained by individu-
als, they can include biased or inaccurate information. Users
visiting a blog might see it as factual or authoritative when, in
fact, it is the online equivalent of a soap box: a place to speak
and to be heard. Unlike chat rooms, blogs are unmediated and
therefore offer a different type of venue for individuals to express
themselves and air their opinions, ideas, and attitudes. While
this may be acceptable for a personal blog, it might be inap-
propriate for a blog hosted on an institutional server. Intellectual
property is another area of concern for higher education, given
the implications of hosting blogs that might include content that
has been used without proper attribution.
Blogs are also highly volatile. Bloggers can edit or delete posts,
and this transient nature can make blogs difficult to archive or
index. In addition, the time-limited relationship of students to
institutions influences the length of time a student blog should be
hosted, yet removing posts from the blogosphere once a student
has graduated could confound those who linked to the post.