What Social Media Web Sites Do Signal Integrity Engineers Use?

(Syndicated synopsis of original blog post at http://signal-integrity-tips.com/2008/what-social-media-web-sites-do-signal-integrity-engineers-use/)

Social media can be broadly defined “as a groups of people conversing and exchanging information online.”

Signal integrity engineers started using social media — also known as Web 2.0 — long before it was ever called by those names: the signal integrity e-mail reflector (“si-list”) fits the definition.

Ray Anderson, the founder of si-list, kindly let me post his history of the si-list:

I believe that si-list went “on the air” around May 15, 1994.

There was a short course on “Electrical Modeling, Simulation and Design of Electronic Packages” that was taught by Raj Mittra, Paul Franzon and Jose Schutt-Aine in San Jose, CA on May 9-12, 1994. During the last day of class we passed around a blank piece of paper collecting e-mail addresses from anyone who wanted to be included in a proposed signal integrity email list. When I returned to my office at Sun Microsystems the following Monday I put together the initial si-list with about 30 subscribers from the previous weeks short course. Now, about 14.5 years later we have somewhere around 3500-4000 subscribers.

So the si-list even predates that milestone moment of “Web 1.0″: the IPO of Netscape on August 9, 1995.

But besides the si-list, which other social media sites do you and your colleagues use for work and pleasure? Take this fun, quick, informal, unscientific poll and get instant gratification of seeing the tally so far.

[poll id="22"]
[poll id="25"]
[poll id="21"]
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[poll id="20"]
[poll id="23"]

If you use site that is not listed below, please also leave a comment by clicking the link in this post. Also please add a comment if you have thoughts about this topic.

If you want more information on social media take a look at Social Media Overview by Gregory Go on About.com or the Wikipedia article on social media.

MP3 podcast of this post, What Social Media Web Sites Do Signal Integrity Engineers Use?.