This year, the Autodesk University people are allowing you to vote on the various sessions (classes). Here’s the link:

AU 2008: Help Us Select the Sessions

If I can sort out a few practical details, I am hoping to attend this year as a speaker. I have submitted four session proposals. These are:

Customization and Programming

Be unfashionable in style with LISP and DCL - Introduction
Be unfashionable in style with LISP and DCL - Intermediate
Be unfashionable in style with LISP and DCL - Advanced

Business

How to make a great CAD blog for next to nothing

If you intend attending AU this year, I encourage you to vote for the sessions you would like to see presented.

Roopinder Tara has raised an interesting point about how different CAD vendors treat journalists and bloggers. Ralph Grabowski has responded with a “Who cares“. Now you have more CAD blogger navel gazing to put up with as I have my say on the matter.

As a traditional magazine journalist (Cadalyst, 1995 - present) and now as a blogger, I’d like to say I agree with Ralph. The label shouldn’t matter, content should be king. From a reader’s point of view, that is.

Where it does matter is from a vendor’s point of view. How to dish out the freebies? Should Autodesk fly every blogger out to San Francisco, put them all up at Nob Hill hotels and shower them all with gifts? Or just the traditional journalists? Or journalists and major bloggers? If so, what’s a major blog and what isn’t? Is is based on how active the blog is, the quality of writing, the number of visitors, how vendor-friendly the articles are, or some other factor?

Every vendor’s PR team has to draw the line somewhere. Some invite only traditional journalists while others invite a host of bloggers to their events. It all comes down to how much coverage the PR people want to see and how much they are prepared to invest to make that coverage happen. Their budget, their choice.