Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Blogging about machine vision – interested?

Some cynics I know mock the idea of blogging, but I think it’s a good way to explore a subject such as machine vision. And a blogger might even be paid the highest compliment--having your blog blogged about.

A case in point: editor Andy Wilson’s My View video blog on the Vision Systems Design website was recently blogged about by Laura Hoffman, who runs the Microscan blog SolutionConnection, along with colleagues such as John Agapakis.

Numerous other companies in the machine vision industry have blogs or are trying to figure out what they could write that wouldn’t rattle internal corporate feathers but would still be interesting. Like Microscan, Thor Vollset at ScorpionVision’s blog is aiming to keep readers up to date on the company and how customers can use its products.

Then there are system integrators who have occasional blogs on their own sites or on a magazine site. These include David Dechow at Aptura Machine Vision Solutions with his Regarding Machine Vision blog, and Ned Lecky at Lecky Integration and John Nagle at Nagle Research. Also, there are journalists who blog about related topics, such as Frank Tobe at Everything Robotic and Gabriele Jansen at Inspect-online blog.

And of course there is the popular and anonymous B Grey at machinevision4users blog, who presumably hides his or her identity out of concern about industry (or employer?) reaction. The postings vary from technical observations and comparisons to witty digs. But anonymity is both a shield and a crutch. Speaking as a journalist who must live with the consequences of what I write, I think B Grey should stand forth and be counted.

Whether anonymous or very public, all bloggers can attest to the fact that it’s not easy to post frequently and have something interesting or new--or at least amusing--to say. Yet it can be quite rewarding, personally and professionally.

Blogs can become good networking and marketing tools that engage people. And you can re-post blogs to other social media sites such as Linked In, where you will find many relevant groups such as the Vision Systems Design Group, the Machine Vision Group, the Image Processing Group, and the 3D Machine Vision Group. Most of these groups have hundreds or even thousands of members.

If you have a comment on what I’ve written, please post it on this blog.

If you’re reading this and interested in contributing a regular or at least somewhat regular blog to Vision Systems Design, please let me know: cholton@pennwell.com.

3 comments:

  1. At Tordivel we "discovered" blogging last autumn. We try to be open and post whatever is interesting to machine vision users and in particular the Scorpion Vision user. The heart of these blogs are the http://tordivelblog.wordpress.com. We are committed to continue blogging because we believe it is an important media. The blogs is the most updated information about Tordivel and Scorpion Vision.

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  2. Interesting point on rattling the corporate feathers... it does require letting go. Microscan's blog is not controlled information and that is one of its best elements. We want Microscan employees to feel empowered to share from their own experiences and expertise directly, and this has resulted in some really good technical discussions on topics such as OCR/ OCV, Verficiation, and GigE machine vision.

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