It's not that good things don't happen in meetings--it's that so much of the good stuff gets lost. That's what makes meeting-heavy schedules so frustrating. Time after time, you sit at a table with your colleagues and maybe you make a few decisions. If you're lucky, you learn a thing or two. Maybe you hear a good joke.

Since you know you'll never remember what everybody said, you take notes. But what happens next? Even if you can find and read your notes some time after the meeting, chances are the essence of the meeting is gone for good. The byplay of teamwork is a memory; the exact words of the brilliant idea somebody had--they're all lost.

Often, that's OK. But sometimes, meetings turn up a gem or two that deserve to be remembered. And I've always found it surprising that there aren't more tech tools to help us do just that.

In the last few years, several companies have released excellent products for teleconferencing and Web-based meetings, as well as recording what we write on whiteboards. But none of these capture the spirit of a meeting: real people talking with each other around a table. Only recently have we seen a few products that make meetings easier to document.

Microsoft's OneNote is the closest a mainstream product has gotten yet to being a good meeting minder. Unlike word processors, OneNote is specifically designed for recording and organizing your thoughts, and it can record audio as you type. One big advantage to OneNote: It synchronizes your notes to the audio, so when you're reviewing your work later, you can hear exactly what was said as you were writing. As somebody who does a lot of phone interviews, I find this invaluable. OneNote shows best on a tablet PC, as it has a lot of features designed to capture handwritten text and drawings, but I've used it with an ordinary laptop and still found it very useful.

The next generation in meeting minders can be seen in an interesting product that's just begun shipping as a preview version. It's called Quindi, and it's the best meeting-capture tool I've seen yet.

Like OneNote, Quindi can record audio and synchronize it with your written notes (typed only; unlike OneNote, Quindi is not a pen-based application). But Quindi can also record video--a huge plus.

In one of my several meetings last week, I set up my laptop with a Logitech USB camera, which I attached to the top edge of my screen and pointed out at everybody else. I then recorded the meeting on video while I took notes on the laptop.

As anybody who has ever watched a home video knows, replaying the ordinary events of life can be unspeakably tedious. But having the notes I took automatically synchronized with the video made all the difference. When I was reading the notes after the meeting, it became very natural to play back what was happening at the time I wrote down my thoughts, and it helped me remember and understand our discussion that much better. Seeing the body language of people added context that even a good voice recording can't pick up.

If you're using Quindi while projecting, say, a PowerPoint presentation from your PC, it can also record that item. If you have the camera turned toward your audience while you're recording your presentation, you can later get an incredibly rich playback of how well your comments went over. You can snap higher-resolution still images (of whiteboards, for example) and have them synchronized, as well. Quindi can even record from two video cameras simultaneously.

While Quindi is a really interesting idea, I caution you that it's still very early in its development, and the app could use some user-interface polish as well as support for more than just the few USB cameras currently in its roster. (But in fairness, how many version 1.0 products for Windows are ever any good?)

Recording audio or video eats up disk space--Quindi estimates 40MB to 50MB an hour for a one-camera meeting, 8MB to 10MB an hour for audio only. My back-of-napkin calculation says that if you video an hour a day of meetings, you'll use up about 12GB a year of disk space. That's a lot, but it's not outside the realm of reason with today's machines.

I must admit that, even with all these fancy software tools, I still take most of my meeting notes in a little reporter's notebook. Because of that, most of my appointments are lost--all I have is a few hastily scrawled lines of text to capture the collected ideas of a roomful of people. For some meetings, honestly, that's plenty.

But when I'm around a table with a bunch of smart and motivated coworkers, talking about something that I genuinely need to remember in detail, one of these meeting minders can be very valuable. Good things can actually happen in meetings, and it's a shame when they are lost.