However, I did tell them in 2006 that they could create a pseudonym for their blog, if they wanted to, because anonymity is a free speech right in the United States. This would allow students to write about sensitive issues that maybe they would not want everyone to associate with their name.

Of course, I told them, I and the other students in the course would know who they are! So it would not be pure anonymity.

As one commenter already noted, blogs where the blogger is passionate about their subject will be better; but an audience won’t necessarily reflect that in some easily linear fashion. You have one student who is obsessed with trendy clothes, where there is a large potential audience and s/he quickly gets external readers and comments and an impressive sitemeter graph. You have another student who is passionate about the mating habits of an endangered tropical tree frog, where the potential audience is small. You probably don’t want to give the first student higher marks; but how do you distinguish between a good blog written for a huge market and a great blog written for a small market?

So, first half — writing the posts. Second half — gaining traction.

(Brief background: I started my blog on my own a few months earlier and came into the class with a small audience.)

I don’t know whether you should grade the results of any marketing and audience development work, but I think grading effort would be a very good way to evaluate the students. For example, did they post their links on appropriate outside sites such as Facebook, related Web sites/forums and in comments on other blogs?

Or, another option, grade for effort during the first half of the semester and grade of effort and results the second half.

Absolutely, commenting is an important skill to reinforce. For my students, I’m thinking about requiring them to comment on at least three (maybe more??) of their classmates blogs over the course of the week. These comments would just be graded on a check, check-plus, check-minus scale–essentially something that will feed into an overall participation grade. But it gets them into the routine and the practice of commenting.

In order to make the whole thing easier for grading, but also for their own tracking, I’m going to be building a feed-based “metablog” that will collect all their various posts into one stream (thank you Yahoo Pipes) for the class site, even though their blogs will also maintain separate identities.

To encourage commentary I spend(as some others may have suggested) a class on establishing the importance of the ‘circular conversation’ in blogging and how this is important for journalism. In the tutorial groups (I have about 15 students per class so this works well) we establish a blogroll of other students in class – then I explain the idea of the pingback.

Then at least one of the 20 posts required for the semester assignment must be in response to what one of their peers has written and they use a pingback so that it appears on the other’s comment section. I stress that the response must add to the issue or debate that is originally discussed. All my students are blogging on media analysis and issues so this works well.

I also have all students install sitemeter and require that one of the final posts is an analysis of their sitemeter reports. I find this helps get everyone reading each other’s blogs as well.