Frequency of posting is another important topic, and the answer varies according to the audience you’re targetting.

Techies — not important since they’ll be following you using RSS
A young, wired audience — not unimportant, but not too important either, since new stuff can be easily shared via Twitter
Any other audience — posting at fixed times (e.g. every Sunday, every two days) or continuously is key

With regards to people just starting out with a personal blog, it might also make sense to talk a tiny bit about content strategy: do you think you’ll be able to keep it up; can you come up with 50 posts that you’d want to write right now; are you going for wacky and all over the place vs. professional/focused; do you think you can muster to write some posts to keep in the freezer to handle the occassional drop in enthusiasm?

Stock and flow is the most major lesson I’d try and hammer in once they found a niche. The post by robin Sloan about this is great. It helps you know where to put attention and how to develop a slow hunch in public

Daniel,
Two things:

1. As Jay said, think about being specific. Long ago, when I decided to become what was much derided as “a blogger,” I joined LiveJournal, at that time the most convenient platform, focused on one area (young adult books), linked to other YA reviewers/authors/publishers (had a blogroll but also linked to their reviews in my reviews) and eventually made friends with a woman in Eugene who worked for the paper where I eventually got a job through knowing when the job came open and, of course, being qualified.

2. Now that I teach journalism students about blogging, I’m a fanatic about wanting a. images — preferably ones they shot themselves, or cc-licensed otherwise, and we do talk about CC licensing— b. tags (I’m seriously intense about grading for competent tags, and I think our neighborhood blogs rise in the Google rankings because of that) and c. links within posts.

We don’t have a blogroll because the class changes every 10 weeks. We’ve also started beat blog posts, on the same site, wherein each student creates a “best sites” post about a topic that interests them, interviews a blogger who covers that topic and posts about top Twitter users on that topic — and that’s been super useful for journalism students who feel doubtful about “bloggers,” as they find out other people who know a lot about their beats and can talk to them about finding jobs writing about those beats.

We do get responses from people in the city for the neighborhood blogs and people they cover on the beat for the beat blogs, and I like that; it also shows the students that they have to be responsible about what they’re covering because EVERYONE can see it, and some people actually do.

Now that I’ve said all of this, I’m not sure it helps you at all. But in any case, that’s my experience teaching with blogs, at least in Reporting 1/#J361.

Very cool that you’re teaching this class!

S.