Social Networking Tools at work for Virtual Instrumentation

Social networking tools are a fairly recent phenomenon from what I have seen. It's only been in the last two years that I started to see terms like RSS, Wiki, and the 'Blog'. In particular, I find the Weblog ('Blog' for short) an interesting way to present information on the web. It allows an individual to publish his/her message regardless of the size of one's constituency. Many scientists and engineers will find the Blog useful for expressing an opinion and also for finding people of like mind. This Blog for example poses topics in the area of Emerging Technologies in the hope of finding like minded people for discussion.

The RSS -- 'Really Simple Syndication' is a web-based newsfeed mechanism that allows one to setup an automatic data capture. One example of the RSS is a listing of news stories. Quite often companies post industry-related news on their sites. The news stories are actually taken from another web site and to ease the burden of copying the information from one site to another, RSS is used to automatically capture the information.

The Wiki is another tool from the social networking world which may find its way into the world of virtual instrumentation. The Wiki allows for collaborative editing of documents through the web. This allows people to share a single document and make multiple revisions and thus capturing the input of a variety of people. This has obvious benefits as engineers and scientists work with collaborators spread around the globe and even those collaborators who they have never met.

If you are using Blogs, RSS, or Wikis in your work in Virtual Instrumentation, I would like to hear from you. You can email me at hall.martin@ni.com.