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Friday, February 2, 2007 |
There's a new twist for editors at the annual ARC Forum in Orlando this year. Since this may now be the industry's largest gathering of editors, it appears that sponsors have been given extended access to us during the conference. For the past 9 forums, you'd usually find me sitting in half-Lotus in the back of the hall absorbing presentations and looking for industry trends (and future stories). Not so this year. There are at least four "press events" scheduled during the conference itself (so far). There are a couple of interview opportunities that I'd pick up regardless of the session. And I have the usual tight schedule of breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings. But of the other gatherings of writers I only have been told of one new product announcement. Judging from the invitations, it appears that the others will not generate news.
Tip (that I've written about before): if you want to make friends of editors, just don't herd us into a room to hear things we already have read in a press release. Give us some news. Even if it's where we all write the same thing, at least that's something. Otherwise we take an hour of our time with nothing to show for it. Help us out. One company at least is doing private demos of a new product. This way we can ask questions relevant to our readers and interests and have a unique story to tell.
3:30:00 PM 
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Still talking training. My news feed just picked this post up from Jim Cahill's Emerson Process Experts with a couple of loop tuning tricks. We're starting to build toward a critical mass of free training on the Web. Good job.
1:46:57 PM
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A new post on the OptoBlog appeared in my news reader today. Typically they do new product announcements or news from training seminars. Today Opto linked to a series of training videos. I checked out one -- introduction to flowchart programming -- and it was well done. Nice to "meet" Alexi. By the way, she asked for questions on the post from users curious to know more about programming tips or other problems. That's a good way to start a dialog with users that benefits both ends of the conversation.
12:06:16 PM
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I've been studying online collaboration tools for several years now. Part of the reason is to write about them in Automation World--principally engineering collaboration and the like. More recently it is to find a good way for us at the magazine to collaborate on documents when we're all scattered around the country--or world. The third thing that has me going is a project I was assigned by the State Referee Administrator for Ohio South (I'm on the Ohio South State Referee Committee - soccer) to update our bylaws and policies. This latter assignment degenerated into a score of emails with marked up Word documents that I had to compile (don't be the only "editor" on a committee).
I've looked at Central Desktop (a wiki-based application), but I've found it a little hard to use. I heard from someone at Wetpaint. This looks really cool, but you can't have a private area. Not that my competitors care, but we have internal discussions that need to stay, er, internal. Browsing today's RSS feeds, I saw Robert Scoble's report from Demo (a high tech conference where companies can demo new products in front of journalists and venture capitalists) where he recommended Zoho Notebook. I checked it out very quickly this morning and it has potential. I have to mention that one of our OSSRC members is a fan of Google Docs. My tendency is to shy away from Google. I like the relevancy of Ask.com's searches better than Google's and I'm wary of the Google obsession with advertising. But there is potential at Google for collaboration, too. Finally, I had an introduction to Adobe Connect. This is a way to share your desktop during a meeting. Not the same type of collaboration, but Adobe has other things and more coming.
Anyone have preferences?
7:37:29 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Gary Mintchell.
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