Questions for the Peanut Gallery

I guess I really have two questions here.

The first question is fairly concrete: based on this morning's posts, is anyone interested in continuance? Do you find it useful in that format--more-or-less unadultered live note-taking--and did you find the stuff posted at all interesting or followable? Do you want more, or are you confident you'll just end up ignoring such posts in the future?

The second question is a bit more abstract and philosophical. Although I realize there are other blogs better dedicated to such ethical questions than this one, I realized that I felt a bit of a quandary as I was typing the posts up this morning. On the one hand, these are talks that are obviously intended and prepared for somewhat-public consumption. But at the same time, all of these researchers are presenting data that is in progress, unpublished, and often just throwing out ideas about what they're working on. Even today, there were a few instances where I didn't write down some sections where they started discussing their own novel hypotheses, because I didn't want to worry about accidentally scooping them to the outside world.

So I guess ultimately, the question is this: what do you think about posting detailed notes of people's presentations at conferences and summer institutes such as this? My own gut instinct is to lean towards the argument that since this is being prepared for presentation, this is probably information that people are willing to have available to the public. But at the same time, I've never been a PI, and I've certainly never been invited to present anything to anybody outside of my own classrooms, so it's possible that I'm not appropriately understanding of what goes on towards that end of things.

So what do you think: am I being too paranoid, or too inconsiderate? I'd really like to know what y'all think.