I'll start off by saying, I'm bad at managing information from conferences. I think I'm writing this as a way to start pondering how to be better at it. I always go to conferences thinking, "this time I'll blog" or "I'll make sure I will get my pictures up right away", or even that I'll take notes and reflect on everything that I hear, but anybody who has been to conferences knows that this is so difficult. Then you get home, you're so exhausted, and it hits you that you actually have another life that you've been neglecting!
This time I decided to blog before the conference... hopefully that counts...
So tomorrow I'll be on my way to the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio (by the way, Go Bucks!) I went to this conference last year as a student volunteer, this year I'm going as a student...
You learn what works from each conference you go to when it comes to managing information (there's just so much of it). I think the key is really finding a way to aggregate everything to one place so you can find it later. Is that a blog? Is that something else? I'm not sure yet. Tags help, but it's difficult when there isn't a known tag before the conference starts, or there's a couple variations of tags. It's good to find these things out beforehand. Also, it's hard to blog from an event when there isn't internet... this is one of the main problems of the ASIS&T conference. There's internet, but you have to pay for it, so most people don't bring their laptops, or they skip internet access for the event. I also remember poor reception inside the meeting rooms last year. I really am hoping the internet situation is better this year.
How do you keep up?
I don't have one method down yet, but I think I like to keep track of what's going on using the tools I already use. This makes sense right? There is a wiki for this event, there's a few things posted (but not much), I do think I pulled the tag 'asist2008' off of there, so that's what I'll try to use for the event. I try to monitor Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious during and after events. I don't regularly use Technorati (other than monitoring my own blog traffic), but I do throw that in for conferences to see if anybody's blogging. That sounds like a lot, but if you can aggregate the feeds from the tools you most regularly use, you can either create 1. a decent journal of your own activity at the conference, or 2. a feed of all activity at the conference... depending on the participation level.
For IA Summit last spring I created a public Google Reader feed of these items, which was interesting for keeping up during the conference, I've already created one for ASIS&T 2008 to see how well this works again. The Google Reader page is a nice format and not a bad way to catch up with things. Of course all of these feeds are in one folder of my normal Google Reader, I like to make it public in case anybody else finds it useful. Oh and it seems that Google has been changing their shared pages features and I think I'm stuck with the fish themed page, at least for now, the page where I was able to change the theme before has disappeared.
I wanted to create a FriendFeed room (well I did create one), but it turned out to be rather limiting for events like this. I had difficulty adding anything more than Flickr photos, so I guess FriendFeed is better for individuals rather than groups or conferences. All I ended up doing was add my public Google Reader feed, so it's just duplicating my other feed, but the FriendFeed room gives people the ability to comment on items. Things can also be posted directly to the FriendFeed room too, but I'm not sure if that's a feature I would use at a conference. I'm honestly not happy with the FriendFeed room right now so I don't know if that's something I'll keep messing with.
I recently discovered that Twitter Search (formerly Summize) is awesome for real time updates to what's going on with Twitter... I like to keep this open in a tab in my browser if I can (not sure on the number of Twitterers at this event though). I think Hahlo on the iPhone has a Twitter search, not sure about tracking events on any of the other apps or how they work. I tend to be more laptop centric at events. I suppose if internet is flaky then I could use my iPhone more.
Flickr & Pics
I'm going to bring the Eye-Fi card, but I've never successfully got it to work on a wireless network other than my own. To have pics automatically uploaded to my computer and to Flickr during a conference would be cool. If I can get it to work then I'll probably let go of my perfectionist angst over pictures and use Picnik to edit them right away online. If I can't get it to work, I'll probably make the effort to put them up right away from my computer, or later in the evening at the hotel. I'm bad about pictures... mostly the perfectionist thing, I like to edit them all before I post them online, but then I never have time for this. Sometimes I publish the photos real quick and edit them later to replace them on Flickr. As I'm writing this I realized I never published my photos from ACPL Library Camp... this is why I need to do these things right away!
Liveblogging
I have mixed feelings about liveblogging. On one hand I like the idea of just getting it all out there, because I know I won't sit down and form a well thought out blog post like I should. On the other hand, I don't always like reading other people's notes as live blogs (twitter posts I don't mind so much though). Maybe the best way to approach liveblogging is just to aggregate? Or is it a wiki format? I'm really just looking for a way to keep this information for myself. An interesting liveblogging tool is ScribbleLive, which I discovered some time ago and looks pretty fun. There's some cool embedding feature with ScribbleLive, and I think you can aggregate things like Twitter to it too, but the embed tools seem to only work with WordPress right now.
My dilemma is that I often take notes at conferences and then they never get published somewhere where they'd be of any use to anybody... including myself, they usually just get lost somewhere on my computer. I guess it depends on what I get the most value out of during the talks. I like links to resources, websites, and even the presentation itself so I can refer to it again later. This is the sort of stuff I think I need to keep better track of during events.
I know a lot of people like using their mobile phone for conference blogging, but I really don't like typing out long things on my iPhone so I use that more to check in with Twitter friends and email. I do like to take a few quick pics with my phone and upload them to my Tumblr though.
Another interesting thing is keeping track of all of the people you meeting, who are either on different social networks or no social networks. I collect people on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and LinkedIn pretty regularly. It would wonderful if there was an easier way to manage those connections in one place.
I am looking for new suggestions in this area. I think I pick up new thoughts on this as I go to different events. In summary it seems the best ways to approach this type of information management is to collect thoughts quickly (and clearly), in an aggregated sort of way, and to make sure you have the appropriate access to a network during the event. Realistically, getting this stuff collected after an event seems pretty difficult to do anymore. I'm curious how other people like to manage information from conferences and what they do with it once they have it.
