A blog lets you publish articles within your workspace that can be viewed by other users. A blog can be used to share news, views and opinions on a variety of topics, and articles can be arranged by topic or publish date.

We've seen people use blogs for posting regular informal reports on project progress, posting job offers, sharing the opinions of key staff members and so on.

What you can customise within a blog:

• Various options to control the layout and information shown on the page. This can include formatted text, images and navigational elements such as a calendar month view that will highlight days containing published articles.
• A list of categories to which articles can be assigned to when they are written. These categories can aid navigation through the blog - as when viewing the blog a user can click on a category to show all related articles. 
• Control who can add articles to your blog, so, for example, you could create a blog that all workspace members can add articles to or you could have a blog that only managers can update.

To create a blog:

1. Under the Actions Menu, click Create a new item.
2. Choose to add a Blog.
3. The Blog Options section is where you can choose to add a blog description, show a calendars month list of when articles were published and make article categories. These will be shown in the right-hand column of the blog. 
4. Using the Permissions section, decide who can view and modify the blog, and who can add or modify articles.
5. Click Upload. 

When adding new articles, the author specifies a title and the contents. They can also provide their own summary which will be shown in the article list. Articles can be added to one or more available categories. Once an article has been written, others can comment on it and those comments are shown when viewing the article.

To add an article:

1. Click into the Blog.
2. Under the Actions Menu, on the blog page, click Add a new article.
3. Fill in the information needed in the Article Details section.
4. Choose if you want to notify the members of the workspace about the new article.
5. Click Save.

Using blogs to help support communication

Getting all the people involved in a large project to communicate and keeping everybody up-to-date on progress towards the project aims can be difficult. Fortunately, online collaboration systems like Kahootz help you to keep your stakeholders in the loop on progress without time-consuming meetings or old fashioned newsletters.

FOR EXAMPLE, The team creating the Barclays London Cycle Hire Scheme wanted to communicate the overall progress in their different workstreams to all of the people involved in delivering the project. Alongside their formal performance indicators and tracking, they used an 'All Staff' workspace and a Kahootz blog and arranged for each for the workstreams to write an article about their progress, useful milestones and achievements on a regular basis. This informal approach kept the whole team up-to-date on progress and interesting facts from the parts of the project they weren't directly involved in, helping everybody see the wider picture.

Benefits of using blogs

1. As blog articles are dated, the most recent updates are shown first, and older articles naturally fall out of relevance - but are kept for reference.
2. If you want you can encourage comments, questions and debates on the articles.
3. Categories can be used to subdivide your articles by division or workstream.