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Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010

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Back in March, my friends Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray and I presented a panel to a packed house at the SXSW Interactive conference here in Austin, Texas. Last week, they posted a podcast of the session without visuals – so I spent some time syncing our slides to the audio.

Watch it above, or see the whole thing here: Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010.

Watch a short YouTube video of my faces exercise:

And learn more about visual note-taking:

• My notes on our 3-hour Vizthink webinar that got this whole thing started
• Visual Thinking for Writers – a talk I gave to our local Vizthink Austin group (see a few slides)
• My sketchbook and drawings from SXSW 2010
• Use the #viznotes tag to see what people posted on Twitter and Flickr

The coolest artifacts from the panel are the amazing Scout Books that Pinball Publishing had printed for us: read all about them.

I squirreled away a couple of them before we ran out — leave a comment below telling me why you want one okay those were making me feel too guilty that I only have four: how about a link to the coolest thing you’ve seen this week and I’ll pick four winners. Contest ends Monday, May 17th. (Be sure to include your e-mail — it won’t be published.)

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David Gutowski and Jami Attenberg put together this cool little event at Bookpeople, noon on Saturday of SXSW. Jami, Bill Cotter, and Stephen Elliott read and Alina Simone sang some songs. There were munchies and mimosas. It was a good time, and I was really sorry David couldn’t be there. Next year!

PS. Speaking of Bookpeople, mark your calendars: we’re having our Newspaper Blackout release party there on April 13th!

Man, this was such a cool, chill party. I sat up in the balcony at Klub Krucial dead center and drank ice water that the nice dude next to me kept bringing me when he’d go to buy whiskey. I liked all the bands, but I LOVED The Golden Filter and really liked Dum Dum Girls. Thanks, Gorilla Vs. Bear!

UPDATE: Cameron Cantu took this cool pic of me drawing during The Mantles’ set. Thanks, Cameron!

On Monday, I did my first-ever booksigning at the SXSW bookstore. My awesome publisher had copies shipped hot off the press to SXSW, for sale a whole month before the release date. People who picked it up at the conference officially owned it before anyone else…including me!

I’d never actually seen the final book before –I haven’t received my author copies yet, so I didn’t get to do the whole un-boxing-your-author-copies-at-home thing — the first time I saw the book, Adam Norwood tweeted that he’d seen it, so after a panel I rushed over to the bookstore to see it stacked next to Laura Dern (not a bad first impression):

I must say, I was not 100% about the book cover until I saw it in person. It looks really great, it has a matte finish, and feels real nice in your hands.

Here I am gesticulating to somebody. Loved getting to chat with all the folks that came up to by a copy. The added bonus was that everybody had their SXSW badge on, so spelling names was no problem…

After things wound down, I signed the rest of the copies:

Last I checked, there were only about ten or so left, so I’m hoping we sell out over the rest of the week.

Hope to have more pics up of the book soon. Thanks to my shutterbug wife, Meg, for all the awesome pictures. You can see a few more on Flickr.

In the meantime, be sure to get your pre-order in!