Many thanks to Rich Williams for his private reply to my “Long Tail of Engineering” blog post last week. Rich suggested that there are many free and near-free downloadable applications that can help engineers do their jobs. In fact, we already have a popular download section on ENGINEERING.com. His suggestion was that we could make this section conform more to the spirit of a “Long Tail” free market place by making some changes.
Here are some of the things that our download section needs in order to become really great.
- Visitors should be able to share their favourite downloads with the rest of the people on the site through a simple upload or linking function
- Make finding relevant downloads easier, perhaps just by making the search box more prominent.
- Promote the use of ratings, comments and referrals by our members.
If you have a favourite free app, post it below or send me an email to jhayes@engineering.com with a link to the app and a brief description of why you like it. If we post it, I’ll send you a 1GB ENGINEERING.com USB key (postal addresses in North America only).
As always, your comments are welcome. Or you can email me directly at jhayes@engineering.com if you don’t want to post publicly.
John