Shanks

First off I have to say that I thought Shanks website was very well put together and presented. It was appealing to the eye which I think is very important in engaging the audience into the website. The next thing I really noticed was all the photos he used in his blog. They were amazing and he incorporated them well into his blog. I didn't get a very academic feel when I initially started reading, but once I started exploring his website more, the way he asked questions and then used other sources and reasoning to explain his thinking I thought fit with academic inquiry quite well. Obviously depending on who you ask, I think some people wouldn't find Skanks blog/website as academic even though he clearly knows a great deal on what he his talking about. I think this would be based on simply the layout being a blog on the internet instead of being a formal academic paper.

I must say that I loved the photographs that Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov (Shanks-Haunted Media) did when he combined old photos of a place with current photos. They were amazing!

Reading Dooce.com I felt wasn't really academic inquiry. Granted I thought a lot of her blogs were very interesting. Her blog isn't as formal as Skanks and I think that is the main difference between the blogs. I would consider Skanks blog as more academic based on the presentation and facts and research. Now Im not saying that Heather didn't do any research for her blog, but her's is a lot more of a personal blog. It has a lot more personal stories then anything else and I feel a lot of blogs are more closely related to her blog then Skanks. Don't get me wrong though, the woman knows a lot and I think you can learn from her blog posts!