EDA Bloggers BoF - What’s in a Word?
Last Wednesday, at ICCAD, the second EDA Bloggers Birds-of-a-Feather session was held. Organized by Sean Murphy and Ed Lee, it was a follow-up discussion to the first one at DAC in June. I wasn’t there, but from what I’ve read of the event so far, it sounds like people are still thrashing about with the term blogger.
You can find accounts of the event from John Busco, Gabe Moretti, and Peggy Aycinena.
I won’t go into their analyses (except to praise John for his creative use of embedding slides into his blog post), but let me just say it is my hope that we’ll move beyond the semantics and start sharing with each other how to make the best use of a new communications medium, for the benefit of the community.
[update]: Karen Bartleson posted a synopsys 
of her lightning talk here.
Stumble It!
I think we have moved well beyond semantics. Near the end of the 2 hours we addressed Gabe’s questions of “what is a blogger” and “how do we tell a high school student how to become a blogger” and he became a little cranky at the answers he was offered.
Which were primarily that it was synonymous with writer and that putting your words on the Internet wouldn’t be viewed as that different from putting your words on paper. Either way you are accountable for what you write.
I do think there is one point that has been overlooked. Most if not all of the folks on the panel are paid by their companies to improvise in interactions with customers, partners, and prospects. This is true if you are a CEO, an applications engineer, a marketing person, a EDA manager, or a columnist. They have to own the consequences of what they say and what they write regardless of whether they are blogging or not. So in that sense the fact that they are blogging doesn’t represent a discontinuity with the other activities that are considered part of their job.
This was perhaps 10 minutes out of a 2 hour event that had a lot of good discussion and a number of bloggers talking about practical aspects of their approach. There were also a number of good questions from and exchanges with folks who were not giving the lightning talks. And for the most part there was very little discussion of the definition of a blogger. There was a good discussion, for example, of the distinctions between a forum, a blog, and a wiki.
Because of illness I have not been able to compile my notes from the event, although all of the posts you have pointed to offer valid perspectives. I appreciate your concern and I am sorry you were not able to make it because I genuinely believe that you had the most insightful comment at the DAC EDA Bloggers BoF–at least the one that I have been chewing on ever since “I wanted to do something like ESNUG, only faster.” I missed your contribution to the discussion last Wednesday.
Hi Sean:
Thanks for commenting, and I hope you feel better soon…
So if I read you right, only 10 minutes of 2 hours was spent on “what is a blogger?” Wow. I guess there are a couple of possibilities: those who have documented the evening so far chose to focus on that, or I just picked up on it in their posts, because I was thinking about it? I don’t know.
I agree it is true that most bloggers in the EDA world do it with their company’s blessing or outright support, and even if that is not the case (for example, me), we all have to own up to our words. Myself, if I were to go off half-cocked and start ripping on DFT vendors, could create a real problem between my company and it’s tool suppliers - I’d never do that anyway, but it’s a concern.
As far as my “faster ESNUG” comment - I’m glad you picked up on it. It’s still a goal for me. I should disclaim that ESNUG isn’t what it used to be. But when it was in it’s prime, it was a nexus for users to discover things - good and bad - about their EDA tools that were not being told by the vendors themselves. The big drawback, to me, was the delivery method: e-mail.
So now it’s 2008, and there are all these real-time communication tools. Engineers are just starting to use them. There are some forums. There are blogs. Companies use wikis, but internally. I don’t see wikis (well, there’s Wikipedia) much as part of overall user communities.
But imagine if these were all used as part of a user/vendor community network, forums to get your questions answered, or to support community working groups, wikis to serve tutorial information or freely available documents for learning, and blogs written by experienced people with various expertise to capture and point out trends in the industry, methodology, technology. Beautiful, No?
Hi John,
Sorry that you probably got the skewed perspective of the meeting from me! The two points I mentioned stuck in my mind because they engendered the most “lively” discussion. I think Gabe likes to be provocative, and corporate bloggers can be defensive about their independence.
We did spend most of the time on other issues. Hopefully Sean and others will post their views of the evening and you’ll get a more balanced picture.
Best regards,
JohnB
No worries - as a blogger does, I’m just reflecting what I perceive as I read. Maybe I jumped the gun. Comes from wanting to be there. I’ll have to make a point of it next time. Now DAC is in SF next year, so I’m going to have to take a vacation to get there…
Cheers,
JMF