After more difficulty than expected, I'm at PyOhio, and once again I found myself not taking notes during today's sessions, but madly scrambling to open browser tabs to each of the open source projects, blog posts, and other online resources the presenters mentioned. It's a rush to keep up, particularly with laundry-list-of-links slides!

The sessions at PyOhio (and most other conferences I attend) are recorded and posted online, but I never seem to make the time to look for the links after the fact -- and you can't click a link in a video of a projected slide anyway.

So this has gotten me thinking: since presenters typically submit talks through web forms, why not also ask them for a listing of the resources that are a part of their presentation, and preserve this in the online talk notes? A few words on the subject of the link would be nice as well, but with not that much cleverness, this could be extracted from the page. Knowing that this will be available after the fact frees presenters to move fluidly through their presentations, and allows attendees to focus on the content rather than trying to type URLs as quickly as possible.

Perhaps not everyone will be willing to take the time to fill out what, to them, surely seems like a busy-work form, but with the right application of social pressure, and after the expectation has been set that speakers will do this, I suspect that a majority would be willing to make the effort.