Results tagged “publicspeaking”

A few months ago, I had the chance to speak at the Good Experience Live conference. Gel's been one of my favorite events for years; I've attended most Gels since the first one, and being asked to speak was quite an honor. Though I had quite a few ideas I wanted to squeeze into a relatively short time, one of the biggest challenges was that I really wanted to honor the breadth and scope of the many exciting ideas I've heard on stage at Gel over the years as well, including from some friends and heros who've spoken in years past.

If you have 20 minutes or so, I hope you'll give this talk, called "New Tools, Better Networks" a quick look. And I'm sincerely not looking for back-patting on speaking at a conference — what I'd love is feedback on the ideas being discussed. Most of all, thanks to Mark Hurst for inviting me to participate.

Much more inspiring than hearing my own voice is my friend Kevin Slavin, who I had the good fortune to watch debut a talk early last year which blew my mind. Expansive in its scope, brilliant in its synthesis of disparate ideas, I said immediately after his first version of the presentation, "that's gonna be a TED talk soon". Sure enough, Kevin delivered "How Algorithms Shape Our World" at TED Global, and it's as compelling as I'd remembered:

One of the toughest challenges about public speaking for me is that so many years of blogging have left me nearly unable to write without hyperlinks. Representing the links between ideas when onstage is even more difficult. Between my own meager effort and Kevin's remarkable one, though, hopefully we're starting to be able to translate the link-rich world of our web writing into the uniquely compelling experience that only arises in front of an audience.

The big reason to make jokes is because they're the best way to get a quick read on the collective mind of the group you're talking to. The volume of the laugh is important, but so is the lag time. You can tell immediately if they're on your side, and if they're really following what you're saying, by how quickly the crowd responds to your jokes.

Steven Berlin Johnson, on how to judge the silent tone of a room when speaking in public. See also his comments, with mention of the fundamental role of call-and-response in African American public speaking (and performance) culture.

This morning, I had the opportunity to speak to the Northern California Grantmakers' meeting, which was a fantastic chance for me to speak to a group of people who really help make society better.

Among the many warm, intelligent people I met this morning was Lucy Berhholz. She very kindly blogged a lot of my presentation, but also made me really happy by pointing out a horrible cultural assumption I made while talking:

on timeframes and multi-tasking. His example: being in a meeting getting interrupted by an email newsletter that breaks his train of thought about the email he was looking for. Most of the audience is of a generation that uses email to be less intrusive than the phone.

Lucy's post is great, it even includes audio of the presentation. I pride myself on trying to not talk about things that are too insular or too geeky for an audience, but here I revealed myself for the geek I am. These reminders are really helpful if you're trying to not simply talk to people who are just like yourself.

I'd mentioned that talking to regular people about the potential of blogging is one of my favorite parts of my job, and that's probably reason enough to pause for an unapologetic plug.

We're doing a series of Six Apart Business Blogging Seminars all over the country. We'd done a number of these seminars earlier in the year, and got some very positive feedback, along with requests to include more cities. So we're doing exactly that, and teaming up with some experts to help us tell the story. When you show up, you get to meet folks like the Feedburner team, or D.L. Byron or Alison Byrne Fields, and I'll be attending each event as well.

As I mentioned on our company site, it's a good opportunity to reach both people who are unfamiliar with blogging, as well as those of us who love the medium but might not necessarily get to use it as part of our day jobs yet. So, great, we're telling people about blogs. But the truth is, we damn well should be doing this much to talk to people about business blogging. We've all seen that communicating using all the tools of social media can make people's lives better. The reality is, those benefits can apply just as much to one's professional life as to one's personal life.

More importantly, there's almost nobody else to do it. Most of the giant muti-billion-dollar internet companies see blogging (or other social media tools) as a tiny fraction of a percentage of their bottom line. That's not to question the passion, conviction, and talent of my counterparts on those teams: They're good people who do great work. But on an endless list of priorities, where does "explain blogging to regular people" fall? I'm not sure. Each company places some different significance on the importance of this medium, and the place I work is at one extreme of that continuum. For us, encouraging everyone to take advantage of social media is a fundamental necessity.

On the other end, a lot of passionate people don't have the resources or organization (it takes a number of people working their asses off to make these things happen) to actually go on the road. Hell, we'd love to do even more cities if we could. The bottom line is that reaching out to new audiences is a responsibility for all of us who have benefitted so much from the explosion in popularity of Web 2.0 or social media.

One of the reasons I've been thinking about this was in reading Ev's post about attending events.

...I don't go to a lot of conferences, because it's hard to justify the time. But one thing I always forget is that it's not just the content, and it's not just the schmoozing (which everyone says is the real reason to go), it's that you come away wanting to do better.

I'm inspired every time by the people we meet who start with the curiosity and drive to learn about a new medium, and leave with the basic tools to actually make something new part of their careers and work life. I find that, though we describe the events as "seminars" and I get to speak at them, I learn much more in these conversations than I ever teach to anybody else. An average event is more of a dialogue than simply a seminar. In the real world outside of Silicon Valley, people are busy solving problems that we often overlook, trivialize, or deliberately ignore. It's instructive to be immersed in a culture outside of the one where we create new technologies.

So, if you're in Washington, D.C. next week, or in Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, or Miami in the weeks to come, I do hope you'll register for the seminars and join us. Also, I'm tentatively thinking of organizing a bloggers' dinner in each of the cities if I'm able, so if you're interested, let me know and we can start to arrange those as well.

You want links? You got links.

• Seth Stevenson defends the word "sucks" in Slate. This seems relevant to me because my keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last week was callled Trying Not To Suck and because I used to get in trouble with my dad when I was a kid and said something sucked
• On the entitlement of fandom addresses the fundamental issue of people who try to kill the things they love. This an especially pronounced trait amongst crowds or groups of fans.
• Just randomly, this old Salon story about the acquisition and death of Webrings by Yahoo came up in a conversation today. I always loved reading Katharine Mieszkowski's stories back then.
• What's wrong with Social Software? Part one, part two, and part three. Greg Knauss is so smart I'm surprised The Man hasn't had him killed.
• I do a lot of public speaking, so I tend to be pretty critical of presentations. ("Steve Jobs is a fantastic presenter, but do people really find smugness that appealing?") However, I'm comfortable in saying this presentation a few months ago by Intel CEO Paul Otellini is just plain grim. If he's not a natural presenter, why not get someone who is? If he's excited about it, why doesn't it show? This stuff matters!
• We will unleash a swarm of 480 million tiny satellites to blanket the globe in a coppery ring of surveillance! Bwa ha ha ha! Except it actually happened. Project West Ford makes the looneys seem sane.
• Beaver Cheese, Cheese Reviews. Reviewing all 43 cheese from Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, and a number of other cheese as well. I also admire CheeseReviews.org: "Cheese Reviews is still in it's vestigial stages. But it is envisioned as ultimately being a full featured cheese portal and community." I love cheese, and I love the web.