Ross Mayfield wrote recently about different modes of conference weblogging, identifying several approaches from immediate transcription to refactoring of comments.

There is no better place to see these modes in action than ETCON. I am sitting in an ETCON session right now listening to Howard Rheingold, Joi Ito and Danah Boyd. Various people around me are tapping away on keyboards blogging the event in real time, and like most others I am also monitoring a disjointed and fast-moving chat session on two simultaneous channels, as well as having occasional one-to-one chats via Apple's Rendezvous technology. Oh yes, and then there is SubEthaEdit, which is a tool that allows Rendezvous-enabled people in the room to take collaborative notes. This is perhaps the most practical tool we are using - one person will cover the current points, whilst another backfills the detail of the previous point and others go off and research references and links that get added to the document. It works remerkably well and provides perhaps the most useful record of the session for others who were not here. Yesterday, during a somewhat contentious session, Joi Ito bravely projected his own IRC chat channel onto the screen at the front - what is known as a conference backchannel - and a hilarious, sometimes highly irreverent blizzard of barely comprehensible conversation flowed past as he spoke, including both attendees and people in other countries following the session via an audio feed.

Several people here are producing surprisingly good quality posts from sessions that combine to form a good picture of what happened, and to provide a starting point for further discussion. Those who use trackback can also make the overall conference coverage site aware of their posts.

A good example is this morning's session on the iRobot:

• Matt Webb took some great notes
• Tom Coates started emphasising some of the more scary aspects of the presentation.
• Dan Gillmor objected to the barefaced commercial pitch that was loosely cloaked by the presentation
• AkuAku touched upon the outrage that many people expressed on the IRC channel at the military uses of the robot by the US occupation forces in the Middle East ... and Phil Gyford later wrote about this at greater length.
• Trevor Smith also published a collaborative note of the session made with SubEthaEdit