Product Support BLOG

[jeffh]

Announcement:

The Revit product support team has created a new BLOG

The Revit Clinic at http://revitclinic.typepad.com/

All Revit products will share the focus. The goal of the blog is to help prevent and solve Revit issues you may come across. Take a look and let them know what you think.

[dbaldacchino]

Sweet! Thanks Jeff.

[Kevin Janik]

It looks good!

So many people post and view here, having that support in another place with another format seems counter productive. Could that be here in AUGI so it that can be searched and viewed with everything else?

With it being separate information it ends up being duplicated or one place has the right information and another incorrect or out-of-date information. Keeping one great depository of information in one place seems most beneficial for users and Autodesk staff trying to be of assistance.

I only have time to look in a few places and AUGI in number one. Will this begin to delute AUGI in a way we and Autodesk might not want?

We can have a million websites and blogs but we have a limit to what we can do and still be profitable as users. Centralization of best practices and valueable information is a benefit to everyone and AUGI has been the best for Revit for a long time. As you can see of many other Revit blogs, the number of posts ends up dropping in most cases and information gets out-of-date except for a few blogs.

Just some thoughts!

Kevin

[dbaldacchino]

I don't think forums are the same as blogs. To me, it feels like blogs tend to have more knowledge embedded, while forums are more for discussion and asking questions. Blogs help catalog and organize information a bit more and have less clutter. To a certain extent, blogs are 'newer" and forums are 'older' technology haha, but both have their place. More contribute in a forum, which is what leads to clutter. That's the trouble I have trying to figure out what to do with the Tips & Tricks forum. To me, it seems like a blog would make more sense to organize the content. But that's just my opinion.

[Kevin Janik]

Thanks for your comments!

That makes sense! Perhaps AUGI should look at the ability to connect in blog type content to do what you say and then we could have the best of both worlds. I was having similar issues with how to focus and clear clutter with the Best Practices threads which I am thinking through starting back up in some way.

Are there examples of Blog type and newsgroup forums together or another format that puts the two together? I just think haven't this depository of great information in one place serves everyone better.

Kevin

[Joef]

I appreciate the valuable contribution the blog makes. I wish that more than one person at Autodesk knew how to create a video tutorial. The Revit tutorials that we pay for with our subscription dollars are carp. Has anyone actually taken a look at them in the last couple years? Why is this the case? I have a Vectorworks pdf book with built in animated tutorials. It's four years old and is miles beyond anything I have seen produced by anyone at Autodesk. I guess if your resellers make money training people it doesn't pay to make it too easy to learn the software.
Again, I appreciate the effort of anyone to produce material that helps people learn to use Revit. I wish though that the effort was better organized.

[Steve_Stafford]

Blogs are more "personal". They represent the position or opinions of one or a small group of people who contribute. They are also a bit of a "soapbox". I post what I want to on my blog. I post when I want to, if I want to. So there is an "I" in bloggIng.

Rss feeds make it much easier to manage blog updates, I use Google Reader fwiw.

I've been lobbying for a RAC Autodesk blogger for a couple years now. We have RST and RME...why not RAC. We can use an Autodesk product design manager level voice in blog form. I used to bug Phil Read to do it, the first time he told me, "Steve...blogs are nerd porn.", cut me to the quick.

Now that he is with HNTB...he has ONE Welcome to the "porn" business Phil.

If you didn't know, AUGI has a blog...BLAUGI. It has a broad focus and prior to joining Autodesk Scott Davis contributed from time to time. We could use some Revit contributors. We are also looking at a way to incorporate blogs into our structure but it couldn't happen until after AU...or the first of the year based on current workload.

Technology and how we use it to interact in person and virtually keeps changing. It is a challenge to keep up with it. How many of you are using Twitter now? Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIN, MySpace, gotomeeting, webex and so on.

AUGI tries to keep pace. Some of you remember that the AUGI board (championed by David Kingsley) took the membership, some kicking and screaming, into this forum technology from an email based guild system. How many of you would like to do what we do here via emails instead? Get enough email now you say? Add a few thousand more a week...goodbye to billable time.

I stopped participating in the guilds because the email just got to be too much. In particular at just about the same time Chris Zoog fired up Zoogdesign. When AUGI started the process I joined as a moderator. The "witty worm" took out the first iteration and Zoogdesign merged with AUGI when it came back online in April/May of 2004.

Though this is off topic, thanks for the thoughts..keep them coming but maybe we should start a new thread?

[Kevin Janik]

I support the integration of blogs that are searchable from here and vis versa. Let
us build a better community here instead of a bunch of communities everywhere then our efforts will be more valueable and the content better.

Steve, I do like reading your blog because it is very informative and valueable regarding Revit with great depth. Many times blogs go everywhere topically and die because of lack of time.

Kevin

[Steve_Stafford]

...Let us build a better community here instead of a bunch of communities everywhere then our efforts will be more valueable and the content better...

Commendable wish.

Keep in mind that there are many pubs, bars, clubs that all basically do the same thing...sell drinks and provide a place to hang out with friends as well as meet and make new friends.

AUGI needs to be a good as we can, as relevant to our members as we can. We need to make sure there are good reasons to hang out here, to be a member. Worth it. Whether or not we are the place where every Autodesk product user wants to be we need to make sure we always matter to those that DO choose to be here.

Yogi Berra is supposed to have once said about a St. Louis restaurant, "Nobody goes there no more, it's too crowded!"

We don't have much control about whether or not everyone joins AUGI but we do have a lot of control over why people might want to be a part of AUGI.

[Edited: I don't want to seem ungrateful...I forgot to say thank you for you kind words about my blogging effort, ]

[still.james]

thanks for the blog, i'll give it a read today