Archive for November, 2009

Brian Fuller is a writer, editor and communications consultant currently working as director of communications and community for the ERP software company Numetrics. As a 15-year veteran of EE Times (including six years as editor-in-chief), he is a keen observer of engineering communities and culture. As a traditional journalist who has proactively morphed into a social media geek in recent years, Brian has also enjoyed a front row seat since social media began exploding (as traditional media continues imploding)… and he’s been taking notes.

In the following interview, Brian shares some of his observations about blogging, the changing media landscape, and how social media is beginning to affect engineering-centric communities.

Rick: As the author of the Greeley’s Ghost blog for the past three years, why did you originally start blogging?

Brian: I started Greeley’s Ghost because EE Times wasn’t the platform to write about how media had suddenly changed and what the ramifications might be.

As a kid, I typed on an Underwood manual a baseball-statistics newsletter to myself that was based on a table-top baseball game I played by myself. Interest in content creation doesn’t get any more bizarre (OK, pathetic) than that! So fast forward 30 something years, blogging was a way to articulate what I saw happening, ask questions about what might be happening and have others (i.e., readers, commenters, and other bloggers) help connect the dots.

I was also enormously frustrated at the time by our own internal lack of agility in developing new Web platforms. While we were considered ahead of the game in digital publishing, we weren’t exploiting the readily available, free and excellent open source technology that everyone has come to know and love. By blogging I could say internally: “Hey, check this out. It didn’t exist three minutes ago, but it does now. Do you get where this is going?” I actually started the first EE Times blog around 1999 after redesigning eetimes.com. It was done in HTML and it was very crude and it lasted only a few months, but I remember a PR guy emailing me and saying “Hey, you’re blogging.” I’d heard the word but had never really looked into it.

I wanted to learn about emerging blogging platforms, tools and techniques and how people interacted with this kind of digital content. I also wanted to understand more about search-engine optimization and how old notions of “content” fit into an evolving digital world.

And self-preservation was involved. I figured if my worst fears about the media materialized, I needed to stay ahead of the curve to not only understand where and how communications value would be created in the future, but to broadcast that knowledge.

Rick: What motivates you to continue blogging?

Brian: Honestly? I love to write. I’ve loved writing since I was a kid (see embarrassing newsletter example above). But in college I ran into a woman at a party who said she’d taped one of my college newspaper columns to her refrigerator because she liked it so much. I realized that if you affect just one person with a given piece of writing, you’re helping the world in a small way. Blogging is the same thing. You can have a big audience or a small audience, but you’re involved with them regardless.

And the great thing about blogging is that it’s not a one-way street. The audience, through comments, makes a given post much more robust than its original words. No one has all the answers, but a blogger can at least start with a question or a proposed answer and let the community build on that. It’s like different musicians coming up on stage to join the soloist and riff off into the night.

Rick: As both a blogger and a guitar player, I can definitely relate to that. So from your perspective as a journalist for 25+ years, how do you observe the Internet changing the fundamental nature of media?

Brian: Grab a beer. This will take a while. But seriously….

The Internet has completely disrupted the value proposition of most (but not all) information, and thank God for that because the media has been effectively mailing it in for 20 years. Every newspaper in the country has the same news (except for a few local stories) and every TV station in the country covers the same stuff. Today, when the entire media industry knows it’s sinking fast — its collective nose is the only organ above water right now — it’s embarrassing to see them put out product with the same formula, day after day, week after week. The lack of creativity at this point in its history is criminal.

Media, unless it’s bought distribution channels or Web properties (NewsCorp., for example), will be an afterthought in ten years. For decades, people marked their existence by stooping over to pick up the paper at dawn or watching the nightly news at dinner. That’s done. Gone. Government organizations, non-profits, think tanks and even companies will become much more dominant players in information exchange and social conversations in the next decade.

Who or what will police them? We will, as participants in the social media world. It won’t be pretty and it won’t be instant, but it will work. Information moves so much faster today (and will move even faster tomorrow) that the ammunition that social participants need to affect change will always be at the ready. (Some social media “disturbances” today erupt, get attacked and die down in 24 hours).

Rick: What are some of the ways these changes are showing up in engineering-centric communities?

Brian: Well, for one thing, you’re seeing a reformation of media thanks to the editorial diaspora. You’re seeing seasoned (if shell-shocked) editors hanging out their own shingle and making a good go of it. They can’t all survive on their own in this industry or this climate, so consolidation is inevitable. That’s the traditional sector. Then there are endeavors like Xuropa. When the enabling platforms are free, creativity is the only gating factor.

You’ll see the mainstream players wither to two publishers, and the only way they’ll survive is to create Web experiences that are something other than just text being pushed out to you.

The engineering-publishing community (traditional publishers and vendors-as-publishers) today still churns out content that for the most part is NOT news — it’s existing information warmed over and served with a side of fries. It’s a rehash or minor tweak to something most engineers already know about, whether it’s DDR memory or low-power issues or whatever. All the information an engineer needs to make smart decisions about his next design choice exists today online somewhere. Finding it is the problem, and it’s highly manual (where is the semantic Web when you really need it?). So publishers who begin to understand that their job is not to churn out information but to find, re-assemble and re-present the right information at the right times to the right audiences will do well. They need to think of themselves as a library, rather than a news ticker. Libraries have a ton of books, but they host lectures, roundtables, music events, book sales… you name it.

Thinking differently, coffee for hundreds of years was a stimulant drink. In the past twenty years, it’s become an experience, whether it’s a Starbucks with all that entails, or something your brew at home, with all that entails.

Rick: Given that most of us go online to get the buzz on everything from consumer products to the new restaurant in town, do you think such personal behaviors influence expectations in the engineering workplace? In other words, is there an emerging expectation for peer-to-peer interaction and support among engineers, or is this impractical for confidentiality, competitive, or other reasons?

Brian: I think there is a certain amount of peer-to-peer interaction that engineers value above all else, and it goes way back to the old BBS days. Engineers respect each other’s opinions like they respect nothing else. But your point about confidentiality is key. That’s where the kimono stays cinched.

It’s different in the software-development world, because so much of what gets built there is based on open source or open-source concepts. So the collaborative nature of software engineering is more open. I don’t think we’ll ever see engineers in our space glom onto peer-to-peer social media conversations the way their software brethren do, unless the very nature of semiconductor and systems design changes from highly proprietary architectures and technologies to something more open.

Rick: If you had a crystal ball, how would you see social media used (or not used) by engineers two years from now?

Brian: Two years from now there will be very little difference in how engineers use social media. You’ll see more engineers on Twitter, but it’ll be a modest, rather than a radical, increase.

If you say five years from now, I’d say that social media platforms, concepts and techniques will be more widely used internally to facilitate collaborative design. (Indeed interesting to ponder the nexus between what companies will develop internally that is based on social media concepts and what “publishers” build using these concepts as they’re applied to education and information). This stuff is beginning to catch fire in the enterprise software world. But hardware engineering is still the domain of the Excel spreadsheet and the phone call.

Rick: Thanks Brian. With change continuing to happen at the speed of the Internet, let’s plan to chat again soon.

In the meantime, other opinions?

Some dots were never meant to be connected. But doing exactly that — taking a bunch of “dots” from one field of interest and applying them to another — is often a door opener to valuable new insights and ideas.

More often than not, a simple shift in context is all it takes to realize the benefits.

I did a Google search over the weekend, for example, on “Bauhaus Design Principles” to refresh how I’ve been thinking about the layout of PowerPoint slides. One of the search results was a paper titled Photoshop Album 2.0: Ten Design Principles from Outside the Software Industry by Johnnie Manzari. Reading through the principles, I let my mind wander to other topics where these ideas might also apply — and apparently found the experience rewarding enough to blog about it.

Here are the principles:

1. Success or failure is in the interpretation of the problem
2. Make the most from the least
3. Use symbols and relationships to unlock beauty and elegance
4. Cut the noise
5. Prevent graphic style from overtaking the presentation of data
6. Make the difficult accessible
7. Avoid long lines of horizontal text
8. Be disciplined about the use of typefaces
9. Use ornament cautiously and deliberately
10. Fundamentally, be concerned with how, and not with what

From writing code to developing presentations to setting up a new blog or finding an interesting topic to tweet on, it’s interesting to notice how nuances can shift — or even take on new meaning — in relation to different contextual settings.

Clicking on another link in my search results, up came a quote from Harry S Truman: “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” And so it goes when combining Web surfing with an open mind.