I tried several different approaches with note-taking at eTech.

With my Tablet PC (HP TC1100) not rebuilt in time for the conference, I thought it might be good to do some experimenting.  If I had my Tablet PC I would have taken all my notes in One Note.

So, on Day 1, I took notes all day using the O’Reilly note taking book that was part of the "freebies."

On Day 2, I used MindManager X5 Pro in the morning.  And thanks to Tom Hoffman & Tim Lauer in their presentation "From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendevous, Web Services, and School Tool" I loaded up Ruby On Rails and instiki 0.9.2.  And the afternoon was spent taking notes in this personal wiki.

Then on Day 3, I mostly took notes using with TextPad or Outlook email to just send me a text file of the notes.

Which was better? 

• The manual note taking is a pain because now I have to make them digital (but I never missed anything, see below for explanation).
• MindManager was good for capture and organizational thoughts.  It will also move to PowerPoint or Word well for the post-conference report (still debating the deliverable format). 
• The text files were basically "usable" but under impressive. 
• What I really liked was the personal wiki.  And I think I’ll be prototyping this more in the future.  Maybe with JotSpot.

The only downside to the digital  solutions was that my computer was on.  And that in itself is a distraction because it was too tempting to check email, do web research, RSS feeds, and chat.  So I got 90% of the big thoughts, but to be honest I probably missed more on Day 2 and Day 3 because of ease to get on the Net.