Thursday, May 1, 2008

Novedge Pulse and CadKicks as one-stop sites for CAD news

How do you keep up-to-date with CAD news?

TenLinks.com and CAD digest most of you knows about as it's been around for long.

CadKicks.com has been running for a short while now. CadKicks.com is a community based news site. Individual users of the site submit and review (kick) stories, the most popular of which make it to the homepage.

Now comes another CAD related site Novedge Pulse.

It’s a new free area of the Novedge website where blog posts, Press Releases, tutorials, and other pertinent information is collected, organized, and presented in a simple and clear way. At Novedge Pulse, you can also vote for each item with a simple and effective thumb-up, thumb-down system.

A glitch I've mentioned to Franco is that if you use PgUp and PgDn as a keyboard junkie you will miss some of the content. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Do you read/contribute to sites like this? Do you care? Do you not like it? Are they just stealing content on your cost? Do you find new blogs this way?

Personally I rarely visit sites like this but I can understand that they are useful for some and I don't mind that they aggregate snippets from my blog as long as they link back in a good way as they do and not just put up plain copies like many splogs do.

I have my doubts on how valuable the ranking is based on that it's probably only a handful that will bother to do the ranking.

What's in it for me? I checked how many referrals I've got so far and found 6 from CadKicks and 0 from Novedge Pulse and some of them could have been when I myself tried the sites.

Both these new sites have a lot of work behind to set things up to be user and community friendly so give it a try.

Via email and seen on the Novedge Blog.

1 comment:

  1. Restored comments

    Franco Folini said...

    Thank you Jimmy for posting about Novedge Pulse!
    I believe that, once Pulse reaches the critical mass, as number of visitors, the most interesting part will be the ratings. Interesting for two reasons:

    1. An additional feedback to bloggers like me and you.

    2. An easy way to discard the less interesting news and post just looking at the top of the Pulse page.

    One lateral consideration:
    Right now I'm manually editing the title of the news (Obviously I don't edit blog posts titles) and I'm surprise to discover how bad marketing people are in communicating with us (customers, resellers, etc.). I hope that tools like Novedge Pulse will push marketers to abandon annoying buzzwords and marketing slang. They should realize they don’t impress anybody anymore with words like “next-generation”, “world-leader”, “breakthrough”, etc.
    May 01, 2008

    Jose Guia said...

    Jimmy,
    Thanks for the mention, what I'm trying to do with CadKicks.com is bring the CAD community together, I find it difficult to gather information for the different CAD/BIM offerings in one PLACE, without product affiliation.

    The intent of CadKicks.com is not to regurgitate BLOGs, it is to provide a central spot for users to decide what CAD-related news is important enough to share with others.

    I also think its important to note that the site doesn't just cater to the Autodesk world, but other software applications that otherwise folks would not be exposed to.

    I'm trying to get the word out, and your blogpost is definitely a big help.
    May 02, 2008

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