Reverse shoulder surfing

Rands In Repose: Saving Seconds:

This is the presentation I want to see at the next conference: in a room full of people, anyone is welcome to walk up to the mic and plug their laptop in to the projector. They’ll be asked to complete three simple tasks:

Send a mail to a friend

Find something on the Internet

Save a bookmark or an image.

I would be fixated.

I’ve been independently wanting to do this for a while now. Clearly, Rands was telepathically borrowing ideas from my brain when I met him at SXSW this year :). I’ve been wanting to do something like this at a BarCamp for a while now. Personally, one of my favorite past-times at conferences is to shoulder surf other people. The idea above takes shoulder surfing, turns it around and formalizes it. I’d have a blast watching it, especially if you get a good mix of Windows/Linux/OS X people and GUI/terminal folks.

Adam Keys @therealadam