Blogback

Ah so I see my point about real-time blogging at conferences being a bad idea has reached Robert Scoble’s eyes today. He says:

So, your boss doesn’t want you to take notes next time he pays you to go to a conference?

No, actually, I’m sure my boss does want me to take notes, since he’s paying for me to be there and learn something. But I don’t think he’d be too pleased when I came back and said, “Well I was trying to blog about what the speaker was saying and my laptop was having some problems with the WiFi connection so I missed a big chunk of the presentation, but I got to meet a lot of really cool people.” My boss (aka the one paying for the conference in the first place, which means if you don’t get his buy in, you have no $$ from attendees) doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about the cool people I met, all he wants to know is whether I learned anything there that can be put to use back in the company, thereby giving him his money’s worth.

Taking notes for myself and writing blog entries for other people’s consumption are two entirely different things, Robert. If you want to use your laptop to take notes, fine. But understand that turning those notes into something that your reader can understand and process takes energy and focus that you are, therefore, not giving to the presentation. As boring as the presentations may be, that’s the reason my boss agreed to pay for the conference and that’s what I better be paying attention to.

Similar Posts

  • More Firefox in the news

    A roundup of Firefox stuff I’ve posted on the linkblog: J-Walk Blog pointed to a nice collection of Firefox Tips. Lockergnome has information on a new Firefox vulnerability. Marc Orchant is pointing to a customized version of Firefox for portable drives. Not only is this a pretty decent idea to sync your version of Firefox…

  • More interesting stuff

    Net non-users likely to stay that way. After reading that article I couldn’t help but think back to my childhood. Every summer my parents would ship us off for a couple of weeks to stay with my grandparents out on Long Island. (Pronounced Lawn Guyland for those of you not from the area..*L*) As to…

  • Thunderbird

    I have only used Thunderbird for about two days when I noticed that version 0.4 was available over the weekend. I don’t know whether it’s better, I was still figuring out what was in 0.3 so I don’t really know what’s new, but I downloaded it and replaced the 0.3. Consider this your head’s up…

  • Pride, or relief?

    I think what I feel about the launch, finally, of the new Friends of the Columbus Metro Library website, is a combination of both. I’m proud of the site, it’s not everything I wanted, but when you’re working with a designer and a committee, that’s to be expected. (Mostly, the big thing I think is…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)