Blog on Blog

Professional Blogs:
Based on my research of the links provided to other blogs, it is clear that individual blogs varry based on topic, purpose of blogging, and the bloger themself. This may seem rather obvious but by comparing blogs side by side the different elemnets to each blog become quite clear.
For example, the "professional" blogs such as those on the ESRI website are often verry informational. Many of them were written as a reporter would on a given story. Blogs about technology and software usually gave the 411 on the plus's, minus's, and attributes to them, as well comparisons to older models.
Other "professional" blogs were somewhat more casual and they conveyed the writers personal opinions on a given GIS based topic, or hints on using software treat they had played around with. Yet whatever the topic was on the ESRI blogs, they all had some common themes such as higly organized thoughts and in depth information. Additionally they all ultimatley were designed to help the veiwer in some way shape or form on the given topic. Purpose and direction in these blogs were easy to identify.

Student Blogs:
The "student" based blogs differed from the "professional" blogs and also had several similar qualities. Since the student blogs are all of college level quality, they were usually well written, coherent, and had screenshots that helped to visually connect the topic being discussed just as the professionals had done. The main differnce between the two was the purpose of the blog. Since the professional blogs often had more information to convey, they were slightly more organized since they had to be for the reader to easilly view all the information. However in my opinion, the most obvious differnce was the collective organization of all of the blogs. The more professional bloggers had their blogs organized by topic rather than by the author. This appeared to be a direct result of all of their blogs being informational based. Whereas the student bloggers had their blogs organized by auther, which then forced the reader to sift through each individual's blogs for the a given topic. The simple fact that these blogs were completed for a grade with a focus on being comfortable with blogging and learning about relevant mapping topics drove the student blogs to be the way they are.

Conclusion:
The student blogs and the professional blogs were quite similar and only differed due to the purpose for the blog. Had the purposes been the same they may have been more similar. From Researching this I personally have determined that one of the major aspects that my blogs lack are the visuals accompanying them.