(recovered post)
I’ve done quite a bit in the way of Blogging Conferences that I’ve attended, and I have to agree with Nicole of “What I Learned Today†in her recent post on Blogging a Conference. She’s responding to another person who says that bloggers who are taking notes for public consumption at conferences tend to pay more attention and take better notes. I couldn’t agree more. The last IUG conference I went to, I had to write up an “after-the-conference†report as a condition of a grant given to us to help cover the costs of the conference. Blogging the conference, then taking my blog notes and basically cutting and pasting them into the report made that process MUCH easier. Not to mention the fact that staffers who couldn’t go to the conference were reading and responding (sometimes with questions for us to get answers to) to our posts. That was, quite simply, the easiest way to get the information we were receiving from the conference to our co-workers – and it discouraged us from deciding that the weather in San Francisco was too nice to sit inside all day and skip out. We were accountable!! I wasn’t as accountable in Boston, for the XML conference I went to a few months ago, though, and I ended up skipping out on the last day pretty much altogether. That was ok, though, because the conference was free (I presented) and I wasn’t reporting to anyone about it…
Knowing that your words are being consumed by the public – however limited that public might be (hi Tab!) – makes you think about what you are jotting down in your notes and pay attention to all of the information being presented at the conference – not just what that crazy lady in front of you has done with her hair!
