commbasics

Today I sat down with Brian fuller, newly returned to EE Times, and did a quick video interview on social media.  But this time I was to one under the gaze of the leery interviewer.  EE times is moving in a new direction that I think is the future of at least B2B journalism and Brian's one of the thought leaders taking them there.  It was kinda fun having him ask me my opinion for a change.

I closed our storage facility today (finally got rid of a bunch of crap) and was saying good bye to the lady I've been working with for several years as we've been consolidating, recycling and tossing stuff and she gave me a very hopeful economic indicator.  She says things are looking up. OK, is she crazy?  Maybe, she's got kind of a wild look in her eye, but she's been working in the self-storage business for several decades, and like me, she has seen her share of recessions.  She told me about five years ago she predicted to her bosses that a recession was coming based on patterns she has seen in the storage usage of Stanford students.  They told her she was crazy then, but she started making plans accordingly.   So what is the pattern? Whenever a recession is about to hit, Stanford students start consolidating stored materials in shared units.  Whenever the economy is about to rebound, they start getting their own units for their o...

For a couple of months now, I've been doing live broadcasts on a variety of subject, ranging from semiconductor design to marijuana legalization , on a new network called Vpype. The broadcasts are sponsored by Vpype and Magma Design Automation and can be about anything that might pop into my mine. Yesterday, I had an interview fall through so I vamped on the subject of privacy in social networks, which I had touched on earlier this week in a blog. This is a big topic right now and I'm kinda surprised I haven't had more discussion... but a lot of people may be on vacation. So the interview can be seen here, and you can comment here, or go directly to my channel on Vpype  (that's even better for the show). Watch video live on Vpype Live Broadcaster

Brian Fuller announced yesterday that he is back under the employ of United Business Media and working at EE Times, although not under the position he was before (editor in chief) but as the  Products Content Strategist of EE Times Products section. From the press release; " Fuller will drive product news, information and community and also provide engineers and their marketing teams with the assistance they need to bring products to market more effectively, leveraging the breadth of EE Times' capabilities -- from products to e-learning, news, events, courses, webinars and video." This is ridiculously good news for the semiconductor industry's marketing wonks, especially those who have come to appreciate and implement social media strategies within their ranks (and there are still damn few of those).  Brian has been on a personal journey into the social world that began at EE Times and their convulsions over whether to stay as a traditional media house or...

Article appeared in the SF Chronicackle today by Mike Elgan of Computerworld on the " Five Stages of Facebook Grief ."  Again he focuses on the lack of security and discovering that others outside of your immediate circle can find out stuff about you. Let me make it very clear:  If you don't want to participate in a particular aspect of society ore society itself, you don't have to.   You don't need an iPhone to survive (I don't) You don't need to be on Facebook or Twitter or Gowalla or any other kind of social network.  You also don't have to join Kiwanis, or a gym or a church or watch TV or listen to the radio.  You can abandon your car and home, fill a garbage bag with clothes and a hunting knife and go live in a cave in the Sierras. But when you are looking to buy something, sell something, look for a job, hire someone, get some information, get a point of view that you might value, find a vacation home in a foreign cou...

I could not resist sharing this great piece of Satire from China... and you don't have to speak Chinese to understand it.

At 11:40 AM, PST, I'll be doing an episode of Around the Coffee Bar on my Facebook Vpype Channel  in a live interview with James Colgan of Xuropa on measuring the ROI of social media in real dollars.  If you don't have Facebook  or miss the live interview it will be archived and I'll put a link here.  Thanks to Vpype and Magma Design for sponsoring this series. This will actually be a conclusion to an interview I did with James at DAC 2010... that got rudely interrupted at the key moment when the conventions wonky internet connection took a dive.  If you've ever had a question about what a social media program can do for your company, check it out.

The EE Times website redesign, delayed for several weeks because of performance issues, hit the internet today and frankly, I'm pretty damn impressed.  It's clean, modern, easy for follow (as opposed to the hopelessly cluttered and confusing site it was previously) and, damn, does it fly!  Even their crappy search engine seems to have been updated. Some people might be put off with all the animation going on, but that is a cultural issue that we are going to have to get used to.  Asian websites are usually filled with all kinds of flashing lights, animations and web-design gimmicks used for catching your attention and it's something we are going to have to learn how to deal with, but the site design is really quite pleasing. However, I'm not a design guy.  I dig content and what I have not dug for years is the preponderance of rewritten press releases cluttering up the landing pages of trade publications.  That crap is not gone, but now you ...

James Colgan of Xuropa sent me a piece by Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch regarding media bias and whether it is important for journalists to make overt effort to show where there bias lies.  Arrington submits that it is a requirement for all journalists to state clearly where they stand on issues and individuals in their reporting, while a journalist he was taking about claims his training keeps him objective... and he needs to keep his opinions secret. As one of those trained journalists I have to say... I side with Arrington on this one. Journalists are trained to approach what they are reporting on with as much objectivity as the possibly can muster.  I know some journalists that have never registered to vote in an effort to remain objective.  But my training clearly states that when we do have a bias, we are required to disclose that bias publicly.  Fox News, for all the crap that gets thrown at it, never makes an apology for it's right of center posi...

Last week I talked about how it isn't important for engineers to join the market discussion because they don't care why they do what they do; all they want to know is what the parameters of the problem you want them to solve.  The conversation on social media doesn't really need their input either, it's just a means of determining the parameters. But that doesn't mean social media can't help engineers do their jobs better. This all got started when John Cooley trotted out the hackneyed complaint  that he doesn't care about what someone had for breakfast so Twitter and other social networks are useless to him.  He says the conversation is too much of a distraction.  My position is, if all he sees on social media is inane chatter, he needs to get a better social circle.  But let me give a tangential example and then a solution that engineers might appreciate. My daughter, Beth, is following in my footsteps as a communications cons...

The news popped up yesterday while I was buried in meetings that Ron Wilson has rejoined EE Times from EDN and Rich Nass has moved over to Canon to work on the medical publications.  Ron is taking Rich's place.  That's kind of exciting to me.  Just like old times with editors bouncing between publications rather than getting laid off and disappearing into corporate black holes.  I think it's a good move for EE Times, Canon and the two journalists.  Rich has been leading the charge for new media at UBM for a while and Canon can sure use his experience to get into the 21st century.  And Ron's talents can best be used by the program Paul Miller is setting up over at the EE Times Group.   Back in about 2005 I was attending a conference in Anaheim and was walking through the lobby of my hotel when I saw Ron Wilson, then of EE Times, and Maury Wright, recently installed as EiC of EDN hunkered down at a restaurant table and looked like ...

I finished, John Cooley's latest reports about an hour ago and have been cogitating on his comments on engineers and Twitter (EE Times reported June 21 that 85 percent of semi design engineers don't like it). John said: "I thought this article was interesting because it also pointed to the  key reason WHY I don't like Twitter    -- my work requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration or I'll mess up what I'm doing." My initial reaction to this point was, "That's valid.  After all you need to learn how to be disciplined enough to know when to and not to pay attention to the conversation, and when to respond, before you can find value in social media." But then he said: "With Twitter you get endlessly pelted every few minutes with random, mostly useless tweets and retweets. "Running IE8 on my netbook is way too sloooow. Chrome is much fasssssster." "Go Red Sox!" "Getting on the plan...

A few weeks ago I posted how Magma beat John Cooley to the punch in posting a customer's rebuttal on his own bad review of a Magma tool.  The customer was trying to get John to post the rebuttal before DAC but DeepChip doesn't really post in "real time."  As demonstrated by today's post in the Deep Chip Wire Tap .