Blogs and use of new media

11/27/2012 9:30 PM EST

Some companies get new media, while others appear to struggle. Some see it as a way to get out the message, some to educate and others just seem to do it because their boss has told them that they have to make their companies socially connected. It may seem strange for me to be writing about blogging when many think that something like EETimes or the EDA Designline are old media. The one thing that these have that others lack is eyeballs. Many companies are placing blogs on their own company sites and from what I have heard many of them get very few hits because nobody can find them. Some people use content consolidators, as do I, but these can take a while to sift through the dross to find the good stuff. Another advantage of a site such as the EDA Designline is that it is semantically aware and does that filtering so your target audience is more likely to find it.

Today I want to provide a big thanks to a company who has contributed many blogs to the EDA Designline and really seems to get it. That company is Mentor Graphics. You will find here a consolidated listing of the blogs that Mentor has written and have appeared here on the EDA Designline. But in addition to this, I often feature their blogs on their own site in my Best of the Web over on EDN. Their blogs are informative and many times do not try to sell you anything – not a single mention of their tools, or to try and sell you a white paper. I enjoy reading them.

Because of some changes in the EETimes page layouts a feature of being able to find past blogs was lost and so I will be providing other ways to navigate for information. One of those is a blog roll that will appear in each and every newsletter and in doing so add to the value of contributed blogs. I am in discussions with other people right now to start new blogs here on the EDA Designline and others who are considering moving their blogs from other publications. With the rebirth of the EDA Designline, this is the place to be seen, so perhaps you should think of having your company send me a regular blog for inclusion here and you will get the same kind of attention that Mentor is getting. However, a word of warning – I am not interested in marketing blogs – they must be technical in nature. How frequent should they be – I think regularity is more important than frequency, so I don’t mind if you want to do one every 3 weeks or 3 months.