Speaking

Northern Voice Microblogging Presentation Debrief

Posted by Richard on Friday, 6 March 2009

Here are the notes I took of a self-debrief about my Northern Voice presentation last month about microblogging. I follow most of the advice Joe Clark gives about giving presentations and agree with all of it. Every presentation, including this one, I close anything that makes a unanticipated notification or unwanted sound, load up every website I intent to show in a tab well before the presentation. I don't do this often enough in a year to get smooth at it. Presumably Bruce Sharpe, who presented directly before me, will post video and/or audio of my presentation in the near future.

What Went Right

  • definitely had enough material for half an hour. I went halfway through my slides. Perfect, since the presentation was front-loaded to the first half. The second half contained bonus material.
  • I kept it conversational, let people interrupt, and with maybe one exception, felt that I answered questions relatively well
  • people seemed to like the presentation
  • the attendees laughed at the right places

What Went Wrong

  • I needed a projector adapter dongle thing, leaving it at home. Luckily I borrowed the previous presenter's dongle. I try to have my own.
  • I needed the remote, which I lost sometime before the presentation. Managing without it, it would have went far more smoothly allowing me to go beyond the reach of my laptop.
  • I didn't get to use the Obligatory Obama Slide (though I was unprepared for it)
  • felt underprepared, not having done a proper run-through. Nobody seemed to notice.
  • had the wrong setting on the laptop's monitor, not being able to see my speaking notes (which weren't detailed) and a timer
  • I wore a sweater. The conference documentarians used apel mikes. Next time I won't wear a sweater.

What I Noticed, for Ill or Good

  • when I made an unsubstantiated claim that between 11 AM and 4 PM is the best time to post an update to Twitter, several people in the audience wrote it down. That makes me think of what other unsubstantiated thing I can say that people.- one person came up to talk to me about it afterwards
  • one person came up to me after the presentation to talk about it more. I had no expectations either way.
  • at least 15 people started following me on Twitter after I put up my first slide, which had only my Twitter username identifying me. Many have since unfollowed.

Speaking at Northern Voice Again

Posted by Richard on Wednesday, 18 February 2009

On Friday at 3:00 PM, I'll speak very briefly about the subject of microblogging at Northern Voice 2009. My slides, in typical very minimalistic form, are done. For those interested in Twitter (and some of its related tools), as well as the location-centered Brightkite, I plan on spending talking for about 15 minutes discussing both the concept and the tools, then opening up the session, only a half-hour long in total, to conversation and questions.

What I Was Happy With, And What I Wanted to Say, At Northern Voice's Blogging 101 Session

Posted by Richard on Tuesday, 26 February 2008

There are a few things I would do very differently at Friday's Blogging 101 for Northern Voice:

  • define blogging better than just listing its features. That said, everybody has their own definition. I went witha features listing since they're fairly well agreed upon.
  • do not give legal advice! We'll have to go to the tape, but I might have told someone to sue someone else who was getting high rank for her name and saying nasty stuff. Not doing that next time.
  • do more run-throughs, with a small audience to feed back. Not a big deal in this case, but it'll be important to present well in my future, and I'd like to get into the habit of practicing in front of people instead of in front of my TV screen.

How to Get Comments On Your Blog

As for the content of the presentation, I flubbed an question that I had a good answer to. Someone asked about how to get comments, and my unsatisfactory-to-me answer was to "comment on your own post". I still think it's legitimate, since it's more elegant than typing "Update:" and gives you a timestamp in the database (and with some systems, you get an RSS feed for comments). My other reasoning for doing it is that I tend to click on a link that says "1 comment" more often than one that says "0 comments", so it's a sneaky way to get your view count up. The best way to get comments, though, is to write a full blog post, but afterwards cut out the last paragraph of your post, save it somewhere else for later, and let one of your readers say it. That lets people fill in the blank you left, and if they're mistaken or you need to add something, then you can paste back in your conclusion as a response in the comments. Blogging is not a monologue.

What I Was Happy About

During the run-throughs all by my lonesome at my apartment, it became clear that I needed something to do with my hands. Last year I stuck them in my pocket, but this year, with good presentation software, I realized I could use the cool little remote that came with my MacBook. Not just as something to push slides ahead—a little awkwardly, since my computer was beside me and not in front of me—but it would keep my hands occupied just enough not to distract from the overall performance.

My slides with only one or two words on each. I used them not because I knew it was a best-practice (I either didn't know it, forgot it, or internalized it: Jeffrey Keefer reminded me of Seth Godin's tips after having attended my presentation), but because after reading from the screen during last year's presentation, I wanted reminders to talk about what I knew really well already, not a script. Karen suggested I did it because I liked other, good presentations that did it, and she's absolutely right. I'm glad I didn't go with stunning photos. That would have been too much work.

I took off my sweater and felt okay about wearing a t-shirt from work. It turned into a short conversation piece when one of the audience members asked what was on it, I think believing I was supporting a certain American elected official.
If I hadn't taken my sweater off, I would have over-heated, contributing to a vicious cycle of nervousness. Instead I sacrificed a little class for a little calm, and I'd do the same thing over again.

What I Did Before Presenting Blogging 101 at Northern Voice

Posted by Richard on Monday, 25 February 2008

Here's a list of things I did on my computer before attaching the overhead projector to my MacBook. They're by no means best-practices, but they were in response to presentations I've seen before.

  • Closed all email, instant messaging, RSS reader, and anything else that might bounce on the dock or send a Growl notification to the screen. At least two presenters either forgot to do this or left them on intentionally. Distracting! The only two applications that were open were the ones absolutely necessary to the success of the presentation: Keynote and Firefox.
  • Pre-loaded all my websites I was going to show in browser tabs. It's better than typing in URLs and waiting for stuff to load, assuming you can get reliable speeds at a conference were a dozen people are already uploading their photographs.
  • Disabled the Bookmark Toolbar, which has links to sensitive information. I didn't need it, otherwise I mis-click and give access to everybody in the room and watching online to my work areas.
  • Deleted the browser URL history. Everybody has a URL or two that they're ashamed of. And if you're not, you're lying.
  • The night before, I cleared my desktop of icon clutter. Nobody needs to know that I download The Wire via BitTorrent. Rather, nobody needs proof.
  • Just before presenting, I tested that the presentation software (Keynote) will display the right thing in the right screen. I used someone else's presentation to make sure that the presenter's notes showed on my laptop screen and not the projector. For this I was lucky I was the first presenter, so I had time to do that. You might not have that luxury.

Forthcoming are what I think I did right during the presentation as well as what I could have done better or forgot to do.

Omnibus: Vancouver Blogger Meetup, Northern Voice, and Shared Items

Posted by Richard on Friday, 1 February 2008

Jan has the recap, and Raul liveblogged it: on Wednesday I attended the Vancouver Blogger meetup and met with some people who actually read this blog. Jan, among others, encouraged me to keep writing this thing, not to worry about quality too much. There are times when I'm in "flow", and I finally realized that one of those times is after having read offline materials for about an hour. Yet again, the solution is to read more books!

At the meetup, I continued to work through what I thought about citizen journalism. NowPublic has a great concept for a site, but I've been following the 'vancouver' tag for over a year and have yet to find a story they've broken or led with in reporting. The overwhelming majority of stories are conspiracy theories or re-posts of stories from established media. For one very recent story I had hopes for (happening on a college campus, so you know there's going to be lots of intelligent, web savvy energetic young folk with cell phones and cameras), a NowPublic user kept me up to date with the lockdown of a building at the University of British Columbia. I heard about it first from Phillip Jeffrey's Twitter stream. The NowPublic story fueled rumours that the police were responding to someone with a gun. Any confirmation on that, two days later? There's also the usual social media triumphalism in the comments, but don't we hate it when CBC and CTV and CKNW claim they had the "exclusive"?

I met lots of people I had only heard about, and some I hadn't.

I'm speaking in a few weeks at the Northern Voice blogging conference, 2008 edition. About blogging. Yes, the very subject I once declared I had lost enthusiasm for. You'll see me at 10:45 AM on the Friday, during the Internet Boot Camp. That's later in the day than I thought it would be, happily so. I'm looking very much forward to Dave Olson's "Fuck Stats Make Art" presentation and Stephanie Vacher's "Apparatus for the Future" talk. Otherwise I will try the conference lobby provocateur role this year, talking with as many people that I've only heard about as possible.

http://justagwailo.com/shared/feed is the link to my "shared items" feed. It will never change (the one to my Google Reader account might). It reflects only what I find interesting, without comment, and includes not only my Google Reader shared items, but also my YouTube 'favorite' videos, my Flickr 'favorite' photos, and my Digg "diggs". There are individual feeds for each (there is no official RSS feed for my MetaFilter 'favorites' sadly: if there was, I'd include those too), so I feed them through the Drupal aggregator here on justagwailo.com. To track how many subscribers there are to it, I then use FeedBurner. http://justagwailo.com/shared is the "HTML" version of this, but I don't like the idea of syndicating other people's content on my site, so it just looks like they're big links. There's something to be said about aggregating decentralized low-threshold sharing mechanisms. I'm not the person to say it, at least not yet.

Lessions From My Online News Association Panel on Citizen Media: Urban Vancouver

Posted by Richard on Thursday, 25 October 2007

This is part 1 of the wrap-up for the Online News Association workshop on Citizen Media I spoke at last week in Toronto. See the introductory post for more information and links.

This will necessarily be a combination of what I said at the workshop and what I wanted to say. The principle lesson learned over the three years plus at Urban Vancouver is that we found it hard to convince people to post to Urban Vancouver if they already have their own blog. Some do it, like Dave Olson, Stewart Marshall, Roland, myself, and others (yes, I'm aware of the poetry and real estate posts), but for the most part, people figure if they already have a blog, then there's no point in publishing it elsewhere. We syndicate most Vancouver-based blogs anyway using their RSS feeds, so it doesn't matter too much. The other lesson from Urban Vancouver is that editing is a full-time job for at least one person done currently by 4 people who already have full-time jobs. The duties of Urban Vancouver include moderating comments and posts according to the terms of service; gardening the aggregator (adding, removing, updating feeds), responding to the emails we get, mostly mistakenly; and encouraging people to participate on the site. We've been happy with the high search engine ranking Urban Vancouver enjoys, and discussed SEO briefly during my session at the workshop. I suggested that writing for people, enabling comments, and having an RSS feed will get people to link to you (or even syndicate you) and therefore drive up your ranking.

An audience member suggested headlines as a determining factor: it's one thing to have a savvy and witty headline, but being briefly descriptive instead helps people get an immediate sense for the individual story's topic and helps people who are looking for such a thing in Google. I could have, but didn't, mention tags. At my session and as a follow-up to a comment in someone else's session, I tried to work in Urban Vancouver's aggregtor effectively being a new type of newswire (at least one blogger uses Urban Vancouver's RSS feed to end all RSS feeds as fodder for a regular column), but couldn't fit it in. I mentioned that it was okay to promote your wares (or others') on Urban Vancouver as long as it wasn't press release style, i.e. more conversational and less like a pitch. Also, copyright owned by the original author both encourages people to post their stuff and limits the work we have to do: since we can't sublicense any of the works, we don't.

Along with Lisa, I don't think Urban Vancouver competes with sites like Metroblogging Vancouver, Beyond Robson, and neighbourhood-specific blogs like Kitsilano and Carrall Street, since we syndicate and directly link to their sites often. An audience member suggested that we don't "compete" because Urban Vancouver doesn't sell advertising—at least not yet—and therefore doesn't compete for the pool of ad dollars.

See also: "What If You Created A Community Site and Nobody Came?", my November 2006 article in which I talk about Urban Vancouver and community sites in general.

Speaking at the Online News Association Conference in Toronto on October 17th

Posted by Richard on Tuesday, 28 August 2007

The flight's booked, so now's as good a time as any to announce that I'll be in Toronto from October 16th to the 19th, on the 17th speaking at the Online News Association conference at the Sheraton Centre. In my capacity as managing editor of Urban Vancouver, I'll be speaking with Lisa Williams, with whom I worked on Placeblogger, at a talk titled "Filling the Gaps in Local Coverage". My current mindset on the topic is along the lines of the Ryan Sholin's question "what's missing from the news", the answer being "lots", the hard part being "how to we cover what's missing?" Individual blogging and local group blogs are part of the answer, and so is aggregation, but the questions I'd like to ask is "where are the editors of citizen journalism?" and "is there room for assignments and/or publishing schedules in the blogosphere?"

Always with the questions. I'm looking forward to visiting with the friends I made online and in person while visiting Toronto last year, and one I had already met without really realizing it at the time. (Long story.) I'm also looking forward to finally meeting Lisa, who runs a community site for Watertown, Massachusetts, one of Bryght's longest-running sites (more than 2 and a half years old) and someone I've known about 2 years before that.

Spoke at Nothern Voice, Impressions of the First Half of the Conference

Posted by Richard on Saturday, 24 February 2007

My session on Blogging 101 went okay: I didn't demonstrate nearly as much as I wanted to (and when I did demonstrate how to blog, I did it at the end rather than the beginning as planned), but I was pleased with the amount and type of questions asked. For next time:

  • less boring slides, or even better, less reliance on slides
  • drink more water
  • press record when the people podcasting the session ask you to (I completely forgot, so I'm hoping that there are notes people took, which I will happily point to). Time passes, and you can cancel that regret call: I understand the podcaster involved had the presence of mind to press record for me, and they have posted the audio to my Blogging 101 session, though I understand the questions may be less audible.

I wanted to do the Brian Lamb thing and take a picture of the audience and post it. It would have made a good demonstration of posting photos to Flickr, but also, it turns out, out of the scope due to time. That tells me that not only can we do Blogging 101 sessions for a while to come—or, more likely, Blogging 201, which is how to do more than post but rather promote and do it really well—but Social Web 101, or rather, how to strategically use the tools I'm very familiar with to promote whatever it is you're interested in promoting (yourself, your company, or interesting and pertinent ideas).

Kris Krug Takes Anil Dash's Picture During Northern Voice 2007

While we're speaking about people using the tools, Northern Voice, not to mention other conferences like it, are great demonstrations of people documenting an event in real time. I wish I could do it better, that is, take photos faster and publish them faster, but since other people do it well already then I don't feel the rush. I'll post them on Sunday. Says the guy who's writing about the first half of the day before the first half of the day is over: Anil Dash's speech was an interesting, different take on why blogging is important and meaningful, I learned a little more about the subject while holding a session on it, and Travis Smith, a journalist in his own right, had a fair and balanced approach to the new and emerging citizen journalism.

Speaking at Northern Voice 2007: Blogging 101

Posted by Richard on Thursday, 22 February 2007

The last couple of weeks I've been fighting a sore throat and an ear infection. It was probably about time I got sick, since everybody around me had gotten suck some way or another, but the timing is less than great because on Saturday I'm speaking at the 2007 Northern Voice blogging conference. I'm a little nervous about it, part out of lack of preparation (more about that below) but also because while the infection's gone, my left ear sometimes goes partially deaf. (I rarely talk about my health in public like this—same goes for my family—but this time I'll make an exception.) My doctor assures me it will heal fully, and it 'pops' every now and then, but it got me thinking about how Stephen Colbert, whom I learned from his Wikipedia page that he is deaf in his right ear, deals with it on a day-to-day basis. Does he, when he holds his wife's hand, stand on her right side so that his functioning ear is directed towards her? Looks like it on the photo that currently adorns the Wikipedia page.

About the lack of preparation: for three summers I did group and individual Internet training, and I've been blogging for 6 years plus now, so I know the subject matter inside and out and have experience public speaking (and enjoy it very much, I made a note of it to my colleagues at a retreat and they responded positively). It's just that I'm a little rusty, the ear infection/sore throat threw me for a small loop, and regardless of that, I'm sometimes stutter when in unfamiliar situations, making them a little scarier than they already are. (Breathing exercises help, so that should not be a big issue, plus audiences are often forgiving. Barack Obama stutters when he starts sentences, especially when he's out of rhythm, but this humanizes him.) I'm keeping slides to an absolute minimum, since I want to keep the session interactive, encouraging questions getting people to start a blog if they don't already have one. Maybe they can use it to post notes on the next session they attend!

I'm not as nervous as I let on, though, because I have a backup plan if the wireless Internet stops working (a conference full of bloggers and photographers itching to be the first to post their thoughts and photos sounds like trouble to me), and I'm confident that I know my stuff. So why so much digital ink spilled over this? Darren Barefoot wrote that Twitter doesn't solve a problem for him, but it does for me. Like Anil, I originally wanted to hate it, but I use it for one-liners, and as Tanya writes in Darren's comments, “transparency has become a part of my life, so when I saw through Tod [Maffin]’s blog that a ’social engine’ has actually made its way to the mainstream, I was pleased.” I'm pleased that blogging is mainstream, because I too like the transparency, and it's fun to share (not all the time, but a lot of the time), and admitting vulnerability every now and then lets yourself off the hook when you weren't on the hook to begin with.

"Introverts and Social Software": How My BarCamp Session Went

Posted by Richard on Monday, 28 August 2006

My 'Social Software for Introverts' Questions

Although it doesn't not seem to be getting any traction (zero comments on my two articles and zero inbound links, and only one mention that I could find, on Kate's weblog), I persisted by going through with a half-an-hour session at BarCamp Vancouver on Saturday about introverts and social software. Nobody took notes, which is fine, I only wanted to ask the question I had written about previously. Six or seven people showed up (depending on whether you consider whether an 8-week-old-baby can attend a session), which was more than the one I expected. At the end, I pointed out my catch-phrase, "my weblog is my social software" (I'm dropping the "networking" since everybody else seems to be), and how through blogging, which is higher-threshold than adding someone as a 'friend' on an external website, I've met far far more people than I imagined possible. I probably wouldn't have been friends with Sacha Peter, whom I finally met the night before after however-many-years it's been, and the guy lives in a suburb of the same city I live in a suburb of!

When we were asked to introduce our sessions at the beginning of BarCamp, someone made a clever joke about shyness/introversion. Something about how I'd be reserved in introducing it (I'm getting it wrong, it as more than a day ago). I actually really enjoy public speaking and wish I could do more of it. I'm looking forward to seeing the photo of Sacha, who self-identifies as an introvert, but who is also a good public speaker and who also seemed to relish the opportunity to talk about something he was deeply interested in, i.e. prediction markets.

My session, just like the others, was only 30 minutes, but it gave me more context and more to think about if people are interested in helping answer the questions I posted on the board (copied below, since search engines can't read my writing), if they haven't already been answered somewhere already.

Social Software for Introverts

  • who does Web 2.0 leave out, if anybody?
  • how do we build meaningful sustained relationships using social tools?
  • encouraging meeting in person using the Web

I clearly forgot that my articles had "Introverts and Social Software", not "Social Software for Introverts", the latter assuming I wanted to build such a thing for shy people, instead of just trying to understand whether and how introverts really use it effectively. And whether they can.

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