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I did this once with Build Good Software[1], turning it into an essay[2]. It was... so much work. The talk was wonderful to give and while I ultimately did enjoy writing up my monologue in essay form I've never duplicated this practice because of how much work it ended up being. Back before the pandemic I'd turn around a complicated talk topic like this in roughly a month of work but this one took easily two, three months to complete because of the essay.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdO4VN1IDI0&list=PLPzMpGTwiB...
[2]: https://blog.troutwine.us/2017/02/10/build-good-software/
If an organizer were to write the essay, would you be angry? Guess it depends on how much you trust them.
I'm the host of a conference [0] and was planning to turn last year's audience favorites into blog posts (as a way to promote the next event.)
Nah, I wouldn't be angry at all, especially since conference organizers usually ask about that kind of thing. But there's also a non-trivial difference between summarizing a monologue and adapting material between mediums without losing the basic argument; in my experience conferences do summary and not adaptation.
Collaborating on an adaptation might be an interesting experience. Never have done that.
Your conference looks cool. I hope it goes well.
This was much needed feedback.
> Your conference looks cool. I hope it goes well.
Thanks. Same :)
Thanks for your comment, it's awesome to see. This essay is literally 12,000+ words (including quotes), you could make a book out of it! 3 questions:
1. Over the 2–3 months, how many hours did it take to write it? 2. Did the post reach more people than the video? (You're nearly at 1,000 views with it!) 3. Are you glad you wrote it?
1. Oh boy, it's been five years now. I really couldn't say. A few hundred, easy?
2. Couldn't tell you. I don't track that sort of thing.
3. I am. It's an argument I still find compelling and I've had nice emails about it now and again over the years.
Thank you!
This is great advice: it can massively increase the impact that your talk has, beyond the audience who were there in the room or the people who might watch the video.
I've tried a few different approaches to this. My favourite is to take the slides (and screenshots of demos) and turn them into an annotated slide deck, like this one:
https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...
Wow this is so cool, thanks for sharing this Simon!
I agree but did the inverse of this, I turned my blog post into a talk. There is a lot of benefit in recycling content.
Reminds me of Zach Holman's post "Double Shipping".
I haven't seen this before, this is great! Wow:
The result? The dozens of hours of preparation I put into the talk for the 200 people in the room ends up getting viewed by hundreds of thousands of people online.
I used to talk quite a lot during my early days and was active till around 10-ish years ago. My first disastrous talk/demo was at Hyatt Hotel in Detroit. Disaster but made lots of friends, and got a smooth not-much-hassle process of B1/B2 VISA to USA. My answer, "I'm invited to talk at a BIG conference in USA." was a nice one to the officer's questions, "Why do you want to visit the USA?"
I usually publish or schedule a blog post a day prior to my talks, complete with source files, and details. People find that to be a good way to just write down the blog post or my website, go back home, and look it up.
Tangent.
One of my first Fiverr gig was making notes and summarizing conference talks, lectures and even post-comment threads. I got bunch of gigs and I kinda enjoyed doing them. Those documents were not exactly blog posts, but people wanted to clean up their bookmarks and have a summary of those things.
Nice, this is actually very insightful. I’m gunna give this a try for sure!
Turn your best blog post into a talk ;)