Blogs (or "Web Logs") have become a norm in the world of the web due to their ease-of-use and ability to display information in an easily read format that allows for its viewers to interact by means of comments on the articles presented.
Many Site authors have opted to use a blog instead of the standard web site approach for the simple reason that its doesn't take any advanced knowledge of web languages (html, xml, javascript, etc.) to be able to create content and share it with others.
Due to its simplicity, just about anywhere you go on the web today, you'll find an associated blog site. Everything from movie sites, to news centers, even religion-related information sources all use blogs to present their information and give readers a chance to comment and interact with the content editor.
With this in mind, using a blog to distribute course information may be a nice approach to detailing information to current and prospective students. Think of it as a supplement to the OC Catalog that gets published. Not everyone has a copy of the catalog, and even those that do may not know where to find the information they need in it about a particular course requirement, prerequisites, or even a full class list they must take in order to pursue a particular degree.
If you've decided to use a blog for the courses you will be teaching for the year, how do you go about adding posts about each class?
The simple straight-forward answer is to just add the content through the built-in interface (what I'm doing now to author this post!)
You wont actually see it on this current site since you only have permission to "read" the content here, but on your own site you'll see a set of Administrative links next to the blog posts that allow you to create new posts, manage existsing ones, and even manage the comments your readers add.
If you happen to be an Office 2007 user (which will be available on campus later this year), you can author your posts through Microsoft Word 2007 and then upload them to your blog site directly through the Word interface.
On the flip-side, viewers of your site can subscribe to your blog posting by using an "RSS Reader" ("Really Simple Syndication" Reader) that will check (on preset schedules defined by the user) for updates to your content (new posts, comments, or edits) and display the content for them in their viewer (Windows SharePoint Services now includes features which enables RSS feeds for blog sites by default).
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (available for download from Microsoft) now has a built in RSS reader that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and view their content within the browser.
For Microsoft Outlook 2007 users, they can subscribe to your blog through MS Outlook itself as the latest version has a built in RSS reader similar to that in Internet Explorer 7 (previous versions of Outlook require a separate program or 3rd party plugin).
Those not using Outlook 2007 or Internet Explorer 7 will be able to subscribe to your blog through any of a number of freely available RSS readers...including those that run on portable devices such as cell phones, pda's, and other "smart" devices.