commbasics

I missed this article in Fast Company last January.  It was about how the Monty Python crew responded to illegal uploads of their video clips.  Rather than get litigious, the up loaded their own versions in high quality, categorized and in their own channel... for free.  The upside is the effort increased DVD sales 23,000 percent. I'll repeat that, because it bears repeating. 23,000 percent! You want to know what the ROI of social media is?  You want to understand why giving up control is a good idea? You really need to adjust your thinking to something "completely different."

I just finished four days of audio podcast recording at the 2009 Design Automation Conference and, in accordance with my contrarian nature, I thought there were a lot of good things.  Let's look, first, at the numbers.  Officially, they are up, but they don't add up, and when you look at the show floor you know things were going south.  I talked to 10 companies, who didn't want to be quoted, who admitted that if thing don;t turn around in 6-9 months, they will not be back at DAC next year. And yet, in all of that there was hope.   Bob Gardner of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium talked to me briefly about the changes they will be making in promoting the show.  The details were sketchy but just the fact that they are looking at doing something different ... anything different ... is a move in the right direction.  The DAC committee worked hard to present some new and interesting "knowledge niches" in the conference (tha...

A couple of weeks ago I reported on Hearst laying off Murray Slovick and said I would follow up to see if there were any other losses.  One of my readers, who I only know as Industry Maven, said there were a bunch more.  And Hearst's Bill Barron popped up today to point out I hadn't followed through on checking out the details.   And that's my bad.   What I did find out was that, at least for Electronic Products and the publications I normally deal with, Murray was the only editorial casualty.  Most of what was let go was support and advertising personnel.  What it looks like was Hearst made the decision to cut back on support staff and keep feet-on-the-ground editorial, which is commendable in this day and time.  I could find no support for the contention that entire publications had been dumped. Sorry to have dropped the ball, Bill

Real interesting first day at DAC.  Free Monday seemed to bring people out of the woodwork in the morning  and traffic seemed to die out after lunch, but it wasn't for lack of trying on the DAC committee's part.  The DAC Pavilion was generally filled whenever I wandered by and the organization is trying mightily to deal with the issue of what to call bloggers.  Essentially the philosophy is a work in progress but there are some cutbacks.  John Cooley was "upset" that there was no food in the press room, but other than Paul Dempsey and John Donovan it looked like we could all cut back on the pastries. I could have had a full access pass if I asked for one, but I only needed to get interview rooms so I saw no need... even though the bag would have matched my orange tie as Georgian Marzsalek pointed out.  Some members of the press were upset that the default access was exhibits only, but as I have said, we all have to be flexible in the...

Covering the Design Automation Conference without limitation. The Design Automation Conference kicks off tonight with the EDAC reception.  I'm going to the conference this year for the first time as a registered member of the press.  How this happened has been well documented and discussed over the past few weeks and will continue to be, but I've said enough about that.  What I haven't talked about is the why. When I began my career as a professional communicator, it was in the form of a print journalists for weekly and daily newspapers.  The biggest difference I've seen between then and now, is the reliance on news releases as the beginning of news stories.  30 years ago, news releases were only for filler.  When you were laying out the paper, and you had three inches of space, you through in a rewritten news release.  You NEVER EVER printed a news release verbatim in any form.  EVER! What made up the core of coverage was ...

A comment on an earlier post today stated that there were few journalists sitting in the technical sessions of ISSCC because the "lacked the technical depth" to be able to competently report on the subject matter.  Frankly, that kind of attitude really honks me off.  So just for the heck of it, I took 5 minutes looking up the bios of a handful of journalists that cover EDA and semiconductors. Nic Mokhoff of EE Times has a BSEE and has been covering computer technology and research since 1985. Paul Dempsey of EDA Tech Forum  has twenty years as a technology and financial journalist and is the main US correspondent for for UK’s Institution of Engineering & Technology  Ronald Wilson of EDN wa s a design engineer for Tektronix, Inc. developing bus interfaces and participating in processor- and graphics-engine architecture and design, as well as evaluation engineering and software-driver development. He's been covering technology for more...

OK, so my last post kicked up a lot of dust over my comment about rewriting press releases.  See the above headline. When I rewrite something for a client, I intend to make it better, clearer, less fluffy.  I learned to do that kind of writing/editing from 10 years as a daily journalist.  When a traditional journalist rewrites a press release, he screens out as much crap as he can before publishing it in a very abbreviated form.  Usually that includes erasing the quote from a CEO saying how "pleased" he is.  When a blogger rewrites a press release, he does the same editing as a traditional journalist, and then adds perspective, which is what traditional journalists used to be able to do. Then there are traditional journalists and bloggers who don't even look at press releases before the write a story.  They do research and interviews to get a broad picture and write in-depth articles for major national publications.  We call those ...