Disruptive Conversations

How many of the issues in this video have you experienced while in a presentation? Either one you have attended or perhaps one you have given yourself?

I learned of this today via a link in Facebook or Twitter (I can't remember which) pointing me to a post from Mitch Joel back in January titled "How To Do Everything Wrong In A Presentation". It is related to the book Habitudes for Communicators by Dr. Tim Elmore. I've not (yet) looked at this book but I'm definitely intrigued. In his post, Mitch also recommends three other books, one that I have (Presentation Zen) and two others that I've heard high praise about. All of these kind of books will only make you a better presenter... and I've added these to my queue of books to read.

Kudos to Dr. Elmore and his team for coming up with a funny and brilliant way to highlight so many of the issues we unfortunately do experience in presentations.

How many of these have you experienced?

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One of the highlights of attending O'Reilly's TOCCON last week in New York turned out to be a short but incredibly inspiring keynote presentation by LeVar Burton, who some of us may forever know as "Geordi LaForge" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and others may know from his 25 years with "Reading Rainbow" or as Kunte Kinte way back in days of "ROOTS". As he is of course a professional actor, his delivery was wonderful to listen to, but even more I enjoyed what he had to say about the power of stories and storytelling. Some key quotes to me:

I am a firm believer in the link between that which we imagine and that which we create.

The stories that we tell each other, and have told each other, throughout the history of the development of civilization, are integrally important, are inextricably linked, to how we continue to invent the world in which we live.

That, upon which we focus our attention, is what we manifest in the third dimension.

The stories that we tell each other inform us about who we are, why we're here and where we're going.

You come here to use your imaginations in the service of storytelling.

He spoke, too, about the transition we are in now with publishing and the road ahead.

It was a very inspiring presentation and a great way to start the day... enjoy!

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Would you like to learn more about WordPress and how you could use it for even more than you do today? Would you like to meet with and learn from other WordPress users? If so, checkout:

central.wordcamp.org

There you will find a great list of upcoming "WordCamp" events around the world... as well as information about how to create a WordCamp event if there isn't one around you (and you're interested in starting one).

I'm a huge fan of WordPress and use it both for Voxeo's multi-blog site as well as all my newer blog projects like Code.DanYork.com. There is a fantastic community of developers around WordPress and it's great to see events like these WordCamp events that help foster that ever-growing community.

I've not yet been able to attend a WordCamp event myself, but I've seen the content coming out of several of the events and I definitely want to attend one... (I was hoping to hit WordCamp Boston this year, but it unfortunately looks like I'm traveling those days). If you get the opportunity, they definitely look like good events to connect and learn with others using WordPress.

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Recently I was pointed to this great video, Behind The TEDTalk 2010 that follows Sir Ken Robinson as he prepared for his TED talk and Raghava KK as he prepared for his talk. They are two of the many speakers and it's both fun and interesting to see and hear their thoughts as they get ready to present at TED:

Behind the TEDTalk 2010 from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.

Kudos to the TED team for producing this look behind the scenes...

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Today marked the first of what will now be quarterly conference calls for the new Fellows of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) (to which I was recently added). It was an enjoyable call hearing about the backgrounds of the various Fellows and also getting to hear from some of the other current SNCR Fellows (including friend and FIR co-host Shel Holtz). We also discussed the research we'll each be doing, the SNCR code of conduct and the calendar of activities for 2011.

One of the more interesting pieces of news was that there will not be a "New Communications Forum" event this year (a.k.a. the "New Comm Forum"), but instead SNCR is partnering with the PR Society of America (PRSA) to have a track at the PRSA "Digital Impact Conference" on May 5-6 in New York City:

Not being a PRSA member, I hadn't honestly paid attention to this conference, but upon taking a look it does indeed seem like a great event! Not sure if my schedule will allow me to get down there... but I'm definitely thinking about it.

Again, it was good to be starting to connect with the rest of the SNCR Fellows and I look forward to working with them all over the next few years!

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Do you want to learn more about social media, online content creation, marketing, PR and so much more?  Do you want to meet people who are changing the online world?

If so, registration is now open for Podcamp Boston 5 taking place at Microsoft's New England R&D Center on the weekend of September 25-26, 2010.  It's hard to believe that it's been 5 years since Chris Brogan, Christopher Penn and company kicked off the Podcamp world in "Beantown"... but it has been that long... and in looking at the list of people already registered, this year's event should be outstanding!  You can register directly at:

http://pcb5.eventbrite.com/

or learn more about what will be going on at:

http://podcampboston.org/

I've attended and spoken at Podcamp's before, and they are well worth the time!  Great people, great information... it's all good!

P.S. My own schedule won't work for me to make the drive southwest due to some family and school events, but I'm looking forward to hearing all about it and seeing the news and posts coming out of the show.

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Remember Google Wave? The big buzz that we all talked about last year? (And that I wrote a good bit about here.) While some of us may have reduced (or dropped) our Wave usage, Google is naturally using it heavily and as 5,000+ developers all gear up for the big Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco, the word is out that you can follow along in "Live Waves" during the event. This big URL should take you there (assuming you have a Wave account):

https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1#restored:search:group%253Aio2010-wave%2540googlegroups.com+tag%253Aio2010,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BeRiTZrZkCcw

You should see something like this:

Note that if you are already in Wave you can simply enter this in the search box:

group:[email protected] tag:io2010

If you aren't familiar with the idea of using "live waves" for conference note-taking, you may want to view my Emerging Tech Talk #40 video podcast where I demonstrated how Google Wave could be used this way.

Note: Thanks for Jay Cuthrell for tweeting out this info.

P.S. If you are out at Google I/O, please say hello to our Voxeo Labs team who will be in the Google I/O Sandbox demonstrating Voxeo technologies and how they work with Google services

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Over the past two weeks, I've both witnessed and participated in an incredibly powerful way to use Google Wave. The use case is simply this:

collaboratively taking notes at a conference

I saw this first Oct 28-30 at eComm Europe in Amsterdam. Members of the Google Wave team set up some initial waves and showed "live waving" during the actual event. Others then participated in (everyone at eComm was given a Wave account). I joined in asking some questions and participating in the dialog. Although I wasn't there, I wound up learning a lot of what went on there and now there are some great notes people can reference about the sessions. If you have a Wave account, you can see the eComm waves yourself by going to the search box at the top of the center column (where it usually says "in:Inbox") and entering in:

tag:ecomm with:public

Now you will see all the public waves that were created by multiple people during and after the event.

At VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 this week in San Francisco, I and a number of others did our own "live waving" and the process was quite powerful in cases where a number of us were collaborating. You can see the waves in Wave by searching on:

tag:voicecon with:public
tag:e2conf with:public

There weren't as many Wave users at the two conferences, so we didn't have quite as many collaborators in some of the public waves - but look at the ones relating to "Google Wave" to see some strong collaboration.

I actually used ScreenFlow on my Macbook Pro to capture one of the editing sessions, because I think you really need to see that in action to fully appreciate what it can do. I'm hoping to edit that and get it up as a screencast soon.

To show how to use Wave in this manner, I created this Emerging Tech Talk screencast based on the eComm public waves:

The Emerging Tech Talk blog post has a few more details about what I showed in the video.

If you use Google Wave in this fashion, please do leave a note letting people know how to find your waves. As we all explore this early preview of Google Wave, it's great to learn from each other.

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On Sunday evening I'll be heading out to San Francisco were I'll be speaking at both Enterprise 2.0 and VoiceCon next week at the Moscone center (they are co-resident). As I outline on a page on the Voxeo Talks blog, my talks at Enterprise 2.0 will both be on Tuesday, November 3, 2009. The first is:

11:15 am–12:00 pm – Case Studies In Enterprise Micro-Blogging Micro-blogging is taking hold within the Enterprise. The social aspects of real-time messaging promise to improve productivity, knowledge sharing and community-building. Organizations pursuing “Enterprise Twitter” solutions however face numerous issues: *What is the business case (including metrics and ROI)? *What are the policy, security, compliance, and discovery implications? *Are there best practices to help with employee adoption? *What application scenarios work best? e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Brad Garland, CEO, The Garland Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – Scott Mark, Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic
Speaker – Wim Hofland, Manager, Inspiration and Innovation, Sogeti Netherlands

It should be an interesting discussion, particularly because my views on "enterprise micro-blogging" have evolved a good bit (and not necessarily in a positive direction) since I wrote my long piece a year ago about Yammer, Present.ly and Laconica.

Next up, and on the same general theme, is a "reactor panel" that is a bit of reprise of a similar panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston earlier this year, although with different participants:

4:15 – 5:00 pm – The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise The rapid rise of social messaging services such as Twitter creates challenges and opportunities for end-user organizations. How can end-user organizations utilize social messaging to improve external and internal collaboration? What’s the role of social messaging in a unified communications and collaboration architecture and how are UC&C vendors incorporating social messaging into their products? How can organizations embrace social messaging in a way that is consistent with needs for security, governance and compliance? Will the rise of public social messaging services render investments in unified communications moot? Join us for a free-wheeling discussion into the all of these topics and more. e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Akiba Saeedi, Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – David Sacks, CEO, Yammer
Speaker – Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext
Speaker – Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.
Speaker – Vivek Khuller, President and CEO, Divitas

Again, it should be an enjoyable session... particularly if we get to have a bit more of a discussion.

Both sessions are "slide-less" in that we as participants are not showing slides... just discussing the topic.

On Thursday morning, Irwin Lazar and I also have a "Deep Dive" on "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise", although interestingly that is going on over on the VoiceCon agenda.

Anyway, if you are out at either Enterprise 2.0 or VoiceCon, do drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere out there. You can expect, of course, that I'll be tweeting from the show on probably both @danyork and @voxeo.

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I was delighted to learn recently that PodCamp NH is coming up Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and 8th, 2009, in New Hampton, New Hampshire, near big Lake Winnipesaukee. I've been a huge fan of the PodCamp type of events ever since I attended and spoke at some of the first PodCamp Boston events a few years back... and it's great to see such an event coming to the Granite State. Kudos to Leslie Poston and team for getting it going.

There already are a good number of people indicating that they will attend and the list of sessions looks great so far. (I'm pleased to see that friend Ted Gilchrist is doing a talk on voice mashups!) Following either of those links you can sign up to attend and/or propose a talk - they are also naturally looking for sponsors to help defray the costs.

Sadly, it looks like I'll have to miss this inaugural Podcamp NH. I'll be spending the week prior out in San Francisco speaking at both the VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 conferences and then will be heading down to Voxeo's office for the week of November 9th. Since I'd kind of like to see my family in between, well... I'll have to catch the next PodCamp. It's somewhat ironic in that several of the talks I'm giving at both VoiceCon and E2.0, particularly the ~2-hour "Web 2.0 in the enterprise" session I'm doing Wednesday with Irwin Lazar, directly relate to the kinds of things discussed at PodCamp and would be fun to talk about there. Ah, well.... next time.

I look forward to reading about it and I'm definitely glad to see the activity increasing here in the Granite State. Now Podcamp NH just needs a tag line that riffs on our state motto... something like:

Blog Free or Die!

If you are in New Hampshire (or want to travel here), definitely do check out PodCamp NH... attend... present... learn...

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