About Gene Kim

I've been researching high-performing technology organizations since 1999. I'm the multiple award-winning CTO, Tripwire founder, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, The Phoenix Project, and Visible Ops. I'm an DevOps Researcher, Theory of Constraints Jonah, a certified IS auditor and a rabid UX fan.

I am passionate about IT operations, security and compliance, and how IT organizations successfully transform from "good to great."

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Tuesday
May252010

A note on my conference talk notes, and my ideal experience

I want to acknowledge my long-time buddy, William Hertling (@hertling) amazing conference talk notes that he posts on his blog at http://www.williamhertling.com.  An example of his fantastic notes is here (it's Alexa's talk, which I also took notes on -- his are probably better than mine.)

In fact, William's notes from #SxSW were so good, they got picked up by Lifehacker!

When I listen to conference talks, my instinct is either to:

  1. take notes in my lab notebooks
  2. Send one-liner notes to Twitter
  3. Take notes in my computer
  4. Listen and let William take notes for me (har har)

Wm taking notes.jpg

I'm tending to do (1) less and less, because retrieving the notes is tedious: I often can't access my notes when I need them.  I find (2) to be entertaining, but distracting.  (3) is my ideal, but if there's other notetakers, I like to do (4).

Why?  Taking good notes is all-consuming.  Here's a picture of William at one of the talks, taking notes, Googling the "uncanny valley" picture that the speaker is talking about so he can paste it in his notes, etc.

Then when the talk completes, he'll quickly upload it to his blog.

I've been so inspired by him, I'm posting all my conference talk notes into my blog as well.

But in my ideal, I'd love to find some combination of (2) and (3), where I can combine the collective Twitter streams in a talk with my notes.

Anyone know of any utility that can assemble tweets from a hashtag, merge them in timeline order, but separating out each person, so an editor can stitch them together?

 

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