Shanks

The way that Shanks writes and presents his blog made me think that at first he was trying to sell something and for a minute, I thought he was an artist rather than an archaeologist. I think that this can be academic inquiry if the blog is used to gather and share ideas based on facts rather than opinions and if the people who use the blog actually are trying to better understand something. There might not be a difference from writing on a blog and an academic paper depending on the subject. A blog could be helpful to be presented with new points of a subject that your paper will be about from the readers of the blog and it can also give the author of the paper can just place the info from the blog, after confirming it is usable, to their paper.
Shanks uses his blog as a secondary class room to show students real world examples of what his field does I guess because I really don't see any other reason for him to use it other than to use it to allow his students to speak up because in a lecture hall with hundreds of people, there might not be many chances.
I feel that the blog is reflecting Shanks as a person because he is more concerned with the content of the blog rather than the presentation. I know it kind of looks weird, but he's an archaeologist, not a website for a charity, and I would not expect an archaeologist to worry much about what the blog looks like, just the info that it is circulating.

The Dooce blog was just telling about what happens in her life rather than informing the public about something that she does for a living. Well, they both inform their readers of what they do, so I guess that is one similarity, but the Shanks one seemed more educational. I think that their subject frame the way they write and its presentation because when you think of a housewife, you might think of a suburban, minivan driving, stepford wife and I think that is why the blog looks so calming, and so organized rather than the cluster of thoughts that the archaeologist presented. Using the computer affects the blog in many ways such as the type of pictures that are on them, the words used, and even the background. These matter because they both have stakeholders. Shanks' stakeholders are his employers, Stanford I believe, so he doesn't put anything that can hurt his career or his work. The Dooce blog stakeholders are the advertisers on the blog. The author, with her housewife image, cannot have a blog entry about something controversial or something that goes against the whole image of the suburban wife or her advertisers will pull out and she will lose her profitable carrer from home.