" Honey, put those broken blogs out the front with the trash can...let's see if the truck takes them as well!"

Several editors have pointed out to me privately that several AutoCAD blog links from Shaan Hurley's site are no longer functioning or the links are bad. There have also been complaints that many AutoCAD blogs simply repeat information published on Hurley's site.

Since I am the one that has been publicly extolling the abilities of Autodesk to publish more product-related blogs - and do it successfully - than any other CAD vendor, i figured I needed to point this silght problem out too.

I have often said that a blog is like a house plant - given enough water (postings) and the right temperature (decent information) it will thrive nicely as a communication tool. My view also stands that lists therefore also have to be maintained, and as it is inevitable that some will drop into Internet oblivion, does need to be given to these details.

The main three on the list that are 'bad' links are:

Under The Water Blog, listed at: http://watertech.blogspot.com/. I am not surprised by this. Other contacts of mine have a blogspot blog and I have had no end of trouble finding it 'alive and well.'

AutoCAD Tips by PostalCAD: bad link.  http://www.postalcad.com/Tip%20Archive.htm. If you go to the home page, there is no sign of a blog link anywhere on this site.

ADLsoft's AutoCAD 2004 Tips & Tricks by adlsoft.com also has a bad link at: http://www.adlsoft.com/AutoCAD%20Tips/AutoCAD%20CAD%20Tips%20Index.htm . Again, no sign of the blog via the company's home page.

That being said, Autodesk's creation and encouragement of blogs for its software is unmatched across the industry. Everyone else's efforts are pretty poor...but it is time for Shaan to clean up the trash a little methinks.

My original post is at

'AutoCAD Blogs way ahead of the market.' Direct link:

http://floatingpoint.typepad.com/pr_marketing_and_the_busi/2005/12/autocad_blogs_w.html

Comments

[ralphg]

Blog links going bad is why I don't have any on my WorldCAD Access blog.

I learned from the days of Web sites (ten years ago) that there was no point in creating links to other sites, because I spent too much time maintaining the side-effects of other people's failures.

Today we have Google. If I can't remember the name of a blog, such as floatingpoint.typepad.com, I just enter something like "rachel dalton blog." Google is faster at finding it in its cache than I am scrolling down a long list of partly-dead links.