Like every other tech company, Intel is trying to reach consumers via blogs, Twitter, Facebook and "communities". The company would like you to please come and take a look, so has paid me and others to write about them.
I’m going to be doing two posts, with this first one providing an overview of what Intel has to offer. The Communities link at the top of all Intel’s site pages takes you to the page shown below that in turn links to Intel’s five forums and blogs.
Inside Scoop
This blog is aimed squarely at general consumers that have an interest in technology. Recent stories cover Intel’s Visibly Smart Tour (Intel Processor promotion) and Extreme Masters tournament (gaming). The focus here is primarily product and marketing program promotion, with some general topic education pieces mixed in (Smart TV for example).
Intel has also commissioned Dave Taylor to create a series of "Tech Tips" videos, again aimed at general consumers.
Open Port IT Community
This is a combination blog, white paper and article repository and discussion forum. Blog posts definitely are aimed at IT professionals with topics like Winning the Hearts and Minds of Employees on Security and Building information architecture using Enterprise 2.0, as are white papers such as Intel IT Executive Insights: Using Technology to Drive Transformation and Implementing Cloud Storage Metrics to Improve IT Efficiency and Capacity Management.
Forum posts (Discussions), however, seemed mostly about motherboard and other computer problem issues that would probably be better addressed in the Support Community. Discussons aren’t organized like a classic forum, depending primarily on tagging for categorization, which doesn’t help to narrow focus much due to over-tagging.
Embedded Community
If you’re into designing with Intel processors, this is the area for you. This community also has blog posts, white papers and articles for download and a more active discussion area.
Recent blog posts like Deep Packet Inspection in PCEF Systems and Breaking Networking Performance Barriers with Multi-core Packet Acceleration are aimed at hard-core developers. "Top picks" articles in the Documents area are helpful in guiding you to right to relevant articles and blog posts, such as these on Energy Efficiency.
Posts in the Discussions area are more on-topic and the few posts I checked were answered by knowledgeable Intel moderators.
Software Network Blogs
This appears to be a consolidation of posts from Intel’s Software Network and AppUp Developer blogs. This looks like the roughest of the "Communities" and needs some tuning to eliminate duplicate posts, such as the five posts I found for New Tizen™ platform from Linux Foundation & LiMo with support from Intel AppUp.
There are links to Tools & Downloads as well as Forums & Support up in the menu bar. But these are not integrated into the main page navigation as they are in the Embedded and Open Port IT communities.
Support Community
This is essentially Intel’s general Support forum, made to look like the Open Port IT and Embedded communities with Blog posts and Document downloads added in. However, there are only five blog posts, four of which are from 2009, with the one 2011 post just a community guidelines post and only three documents. So the main attraction here is the Forums.
The same Forum format / engine is used as in the other community discussion areas. But at least there are separate forums for General Discussion, Desktop Boards, Processors, Graphics, Chipsets, Servers, Solid State Drives, Wireless and Intel WiDi.
This is where you’d go if you have a question on Intel hardware. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be monitored as well as the Embedded community forum, so you might not get timely answer, or any at all.
That’s it for the overview. Next time, I’ll see if I can find some good networking related blog posts and papers to point you to. In the meantime, other interesting information from Intel can be found here.