Monday, June 28, 2010

Another Blogroll Update

From the discussion over at Plastics News, I'm adding Highline PC .

If you haven't seen the above linked discussion, please take a look. It's about the poor state of the blogosphere in the polymer areas, something that is now becoming painfully obvious the pitifulness of the state, especially compared to similar areas (chemistry, physics...)

Improving this isn't just a one person operation. We all need to work together. It's good to see that something is happening. Let's keep it going.

6 comments:

Eric F. Brown said...

John--could the social media issue be one of numbers? Only a small percent of readers will actively participate in a blog, and both the polymer field and the rheology field are small compared to the chemistry field and physics field.

John said...

Certainly the number of people reading a blog is greater than the number of people actively commenting in the blog, and that is also bigger than the number of people blogging.

As for the number of people in the relative fields, I'm not sure. My undergraduate ChemE class (a big feeder to polymer work)at Minnesota was about 120, while the Chem class that same year was about 10. Graduate school (Illinois - Urbana) was different. The chem depart was the largest in the country - no idea how many graduated in a year compared to the ~ 15 in my ChemE class. But very few people go to graduate school, so I don't weight that heavily.

As for rheologists, we're in an entirely different field, one where angels fear to tread (lest they get stuck in the viscoelastic mire!)

Craig Carrel said...

John,

My view is that most plastics companies, in particular molding companies, are not the best marketers and have no clue about social media/marketing. They feel that they have a website that is several years old and never updated so they are up to speed on the web. They use email so they are state of the art.

They are clueless to Web 2.0 and do not see the revolutionary change in how we will communicate that is happening right before their eyes. It is amazing to me the reach you can achieve and the ones who survive will figure it out sooner than later.

John said...

I'm still trying to figure out Web 2.0, but I'm certainly not alone. I'm not sure that anyone is making any money at it other than people who are selling "How to make money on Web 2.0 (TM)".

The real strange thing about my situation is that Andersen Windows (the company that own my empolyer, Aspen Research - long story for another time) is gung-ho about the whole idea. We can go for it all -and they have encourage us to use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogging, with the obvious warnings about being respectful, getting your work done...

This despite having extrodinarily tight control over all other internet aspects that make us jealous of the Chinese - we cannot access any streaming radio or video or image search engine (the thumbnails from blocked porno sights my show up) or Youtube (except between 8 AM and 10 AM) or private email systems (gmail, yahoo, aol...). Go figure!

Eric F. Brown said...

I wonder, though, if anyone besides a few bloggers has figured out Web 2.0. Most of the stories that stick in my head involve a single consumer publicly rebuking a company for poor service (think Jeff Jarvis and his Dell Hell posts or the "United Breaks Guitars" guy).

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