SpeakHQ Blog
To keep track of all the interviews, research and stories I’m putting together for the next book, I’ve set up a new blog called speakerconfessions.com. Why the new blog? One reason. Public speaking is a polarizing topic – some people find it fascinating, others are bored to tears. Rather than annoy half of you here,…
Read MoreLast call for presentation camp – a brand new unconference event for people interested in pitching, presenting and public speaking. Presentation Camp At UW communications building (map) Saturday April 4th 2009, 9am-4:30pm (Full schedule here) It’s $15 if you register by noon today, $20 later today or at the door. I’ll be doing a keynote…
Read MoreSaturday April 4th Kathy Gill and I are running the first ever Seattle presentation camp, an unconference for people interested in all forms of public speaking, presenting, and pitching ideas. We’ve posted the core schedule with some of the sessions that we know will take place, as well as plenty of slots for unconference style…
Read MoreAs research for my bestselling book on Public Speaking, I listened to dozens of famous speeches. I found a list of the top 100 speeches of all time and worked my way through it, making the following observations: We have technology bias. Since we don’t have recordings of, for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Jesus’ sermon on…
Read MoreDuncan Davidson has a nice post listing several annoying habits some conference presenters have. Duncan of course notices these things since he’s often paid to photograph speakers, and these things make that more difficult than it should be. He includes several good ones including my favorite: Please take off your name tag. This is self…
Read MoreOne of my favorite things at Adaptive Path’s MX event this week was how they had designers assigned to make large drawings based on the current talk, as the talk was happening. It was real time art/design/creation – super cool. Here’s Teresa Brazen’s drawing of my talk, Why designers fail: The cool thing is that…
Read MoreI find YouTube fascinating from a “how much things change yet stay the same” perspective. We love to talk about how different the world is than the pre-internet days of say 1989, but when I look at YouTube I see lots of video of people speaking in public. Lectures, talks, monologues, etc. Yes, it’s true,…
Read MoreKrishna makes an interesting point on his thought clusters blog about professions that involve getting paid for talking about the profession itself. Historically most professions made this impossible. You can’t make a building about making a building, or prepare a meal that’s about preparing a meal. It’d be a real stretch if you tried (“The…
Read MoreThe first ever foo camp style event on public speaking is taking place on March 21st in San Francisco. I’d love to go but can’t make it. It’s called Presentation camp, Organized by the folks who make SlideShare. There’s some discussion of trying to do a presentation camp here in Seattle, if you’re interested let…
Read MoreFor the last few months I’ve been working on the next book. In fact, since the last book, I started working on at least two different books, each of which fell over, exploded into flames, and disappeared from the universe from their sheer badness, before I worked my way into this one, which I’m happy…
Read More