DFT Digest

February 24, 2008

New vs. Old Media in the land of EDA

Filed under: Industry — John @ 12:36 pm

I love this: JL Gray of CoolVerification blogged about a recent experience, taking part in a roundtable discussion to be published in DACeZine (a fairly new on-line publication put out by the organizers of DAC). It’s unclear whether the discussion, titled “Changing communications channels within the electronics industry”, was intended to touch on traditional media vs. “blogging”, but JL comments that he hadn’t realized that even in the electronics industry, there is a bit of animus for the blogger species.

Running like scared monkeys, these journalists. I find their attitude amusing, given the fact that every major trade pub now has a blog section - what? If you can’t beat ‘em… Gabe Moretti has two blogs (Gabe on EDA, and EDA DesignLine). So what’s the beef? I read the trade pubs a lot. I blog about what I find interesting that touches those of us in design-for-test. But since I blog, my sources are questionable? Irony alert… trade pub journalists calling themselves questionable… If there’s anything that makes what they publish questionable, it’s the fact that most of it is generated by the marketing departments of EDA vendors, not “journalists”.

Here’s what I hope: in the nearest of possible futures, someone will figure out a new-world business model that will support independent industry coverage that over the years has been supplied by people like Goering, Santarini, Aycinena, Maniwa, and others. It shouldn’t have to be supported by EDA, just compelling enough to draw interest and consistent readership (and dare I say contribution) from the people they should be writing for: the engineers.

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December 18, 2007

Blogs at 10 - How close are you to the original purpose?

Filed under: Miscellaneous — John @ 11:14 am

Check out this top 10 list (h/t Maggies Farm) from the acknowledged creator of the term ‘weblogs’, Jorn Barger - indispensible advice for new bloggers (which I’m sure applies to all bloggers). Interestingly enough, his concept of a blog lines up more with a site like del.icio.us than with any of the most popular blogging platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress, etc., which is reflected in his rule #2:

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

So where does that leave us? I can certainly relate to the humility lesson. Even though I do try to create original content, because I think it will attract readers, I also try to always credit my sources, and link to content that supplements my material, because more than anyone else, I know what I don’t know, which is plenty.

Personally, I found the list to be helpful - I like numbers 9-10, which may help to aggregate more high quality DFT content for me to post (I do some aggregation of DFT News already - at my Blogger account).

On more thing. After checking out the picture, I think Mr. Barger belongs in the Motley Crew that John Busco blogged about last week!

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