Module Four

1. The first blog I found was an info blog. This came from ecoearth.info, and was a series of blogs written by a Dr. Glen Barry. These blogs covered a wide range of environmental issues, ranging from protection and conservation of forests to challenging groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace for supporting certain logging practices.

The nest blog I found was a more "vanity" or personal oriented blog at the site www.mattcutts.com. Matt Cutts works for Google as some kind of technical assistant who answers question online and in the media on behalf of Google. On his site he has many blogs on numerous subjects, such as books, food, music, travel, personal and about ten more. Each of those topics had several blogs within them where readers could reply to Mr. Cutts and post their opinions on the subject.

The two sites were actually relatively similar in presentation while completely different in presentation. Cutt's site had many more topics available to chose and bring up, but once they were on they were presented in a similar manner as Dr. Barry's on the EcoEarth website. They main differences were found in the significance of the readers comments on the blogs. Since it was part of his job, Mr. Cutt's would often reply to those who replied to his blogs. Dr. Barry, however, was more concerned with presenting information and his sources than responding to his readers. Overall however, the two were quite similar in presentation and dramatically different in content.

2. I think blogging works well presenting this kind of information, but still not as well as print. I still stand by the notion that print media is far more reliable than blogging. Any individual could create a slick site and attempt to present news items whether they are true or not, and if the site looks legitimate enough, most would believe it. I know a woman who used an article from The Onion as a source in a speech about how Harry Potter influences children to practice witchcraft if you want an example. However, Dr. Barry's blogs that I viewed were interesting and well but together pieces. I thought this was a very good sample of an information based blog, as he seemed to be a legitimate source and also provided the sources from which he collected his information. As far as a good vanity blog goes, I suppose any could really be classified as good or bad. The basis of these blogs are nothing more than personal opinions and information, so it seems to would take a pretty stupid kind of person to do that wrong. But what do I know. I'm just some ugly looking heavy metal kid.

3. So once again, I still stand by my original thesis and don't really feel the information I found today supported or unsupported my thesis. The info blog I discovered was quite interesting, however I would be much more inclined to read these articles in print form. So yeah, I'm still right.