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.

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