I don’t know if anyone else has been to a panel flanked by an Ogilvy Notes live sketched, but basically its just a dude live sketching and taking notes on a whiteboard for people who can’t be at SXSW. Sort of an analog version of what we Surrogates are doing.

I’m struggling what to think about it, while at the same time trying to relate it to our version. My main thought is this, if you check out the Ogilvy Notes site, you’ll find a pretty cool assortment of informative doodles, but it’s a little too schizophrenic/patchworky/beautiful mindy to really glean much from it.

I think my panel with @abroad yesterday offered the perfect example: Food ethicist Michael Pollan gave a talk spelling out his food philosophy. A note taker in the crowd took incredibly detailed and illustrative notes, and by the end of the talk, he had a beautiful and impossibly confusing 8×10 work of art. But nothing, no matter how pretty or seemingly exhaustive, summed up Pollan’s food philosophy better than one single sentence:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” -Michael Pollan