Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

John Dodge

Ten years of blogging, engineers remain wary

Has it been that long since bloggers exploded onto the scene? Now there's an estimated 70 million blogs, more than one for every man, woman and child in California, New York, Michigan and Illinois combined. Former colleague Dan Farber at ZDNet wrote a worthy retrospective on blogs. Given that many blogs, there must be some engineers out there that do it. True to the anti-social stereotype, engineers just don't seem drawn to blogging. That's too bad given the actual knowledge they have, say, compared to someone simply with political or religious views to express. 

Actually, there's a glimmer of hope. I have found some pretty decent engineering blogs. They include an admissions blog to Cornell School of Engineering; a radio frequency blog that's more like a web site; a Dell blog to tech talk and Curious Cat, a science and engineering blog. With the staggering number of new blogs created every day, how could there not be more engineering blogs than a couple of years when a similar search turned up virtually none? Perhaps, there's only a snowball's chance that engineers will blog en masse. I've tried to coax some into it who I thought would be good, but have enjoyed limited success. We do have Matt Traum, an MIT doctoral candidate blogging on alternative fuels in I Have the Power! Also, another engineer is about to go online at Designnews.com. But we need more…perhaps you? We want to liven up the conversation.