Customizing conference speeches for your audience

Over the past few weeks new conversations have emerged regarding how conferences must change to better suit their audience. As a conference producer, conference speaker, and attendee I have many opinions on running a great show but today’s post will focus on speakers. In this post I will share three speaking tips that keep coming up in my conversations with other speakers in the industry.

Widget Summit schedule complete

The Widget Summit schedule is now complete, and I am pretty happy with the results. My goal for the conference is to provide two days of intensive education about the current state of the widget industry and share best practices with the many new publishers entering the space. This year’s conference spans two days, October 15-16, covering both the business and implementation of widgets. I will share some of my speaker notes before the conference, but first let’s take a look at some of the overarching themes of Widget Summit.

Two feed syndication talks at Web 2.0 Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo officially kicked off yesterday at the Moscone conference center in San Francisco, bringing together thousands of web technologists to learn new things and market new web products. I participated in conference planning as a program chair, selecting a range of topics to educate technical product managers on the latest web technology, specifically in the Web 2.0 Fundamentals track. I’m leading two sessions at the conference on feed syndication technologies and I’ll be in attendance all three days if you’d like to say hello. Intermediate to Advanced Syndication Web frameworks and software packages now feature basic…

Foo Camp geek out

I spent last weekend at Foo Camp hosted at O’Reilly’s headquarters in Sebastopol, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. The 200-person event was 3 days of non-stop conversations, sessions, and planning with the occasional break for food or a few hours sleep under a cubicle desk. I was blown away by the quality of conversations and intellectually challenging ideas and formulations each day. A few things stood out, and I’ll summarize a bit here before I forget Friday, Day 1 On Friday evening I discussed oil futures and web-scale micropayments with economist Hal Varian. Hal wrote Information Rules,…

World Cup vs. Gnomedex

Germany plays Argentina this Friday, June 30, at 8 a.m. Pacific time. If you’re at Gnomedex I’ll have a viewing party in my room at the Edgewater. I’m rooting for Argentina. I’ll be missing Chris Pirillo’s opening statements and Mike Arrington’s discussion, but no way they can’t compete with Germany playing Argentina in Berlin. Sorry Om, I might miss the beginning of your session too. Given the possible matchups on Saturday such as England vs. Portugal or Brazil vs. Spain/France these will be tough choices for morning sessions….

Bloggercon early thoughts

I am attending Bloggercon for the next two days, listening, participating and leading conversations on the world of blogging. Some quick observations from the last three hours of the conference: The live conversation surrounding me is competing with the conversations happening in the blogosphere. If the conversation becomes uninteresting I open my feed aggregator and see what’s new among another few hundred sources of information. (pictured above: Marc Canter sleeping). Bloggercon is a non-commercial conference focused on users, with no commercial messages or pitches allowed to leave your mouth. A few attendees wore t-shirts with messaging instead, letting the…

Standards for Users

When I think of standards I think of the Stephenson gauge. Two pieces of steel laid at 4′ 8.5″ apart carries rail traffic for 60% of the world’s railroads. The standard has been around for centuries, allowing easy interoperability between rail lines from different companies and countries, creating new and cheaper opportunities for commerce around the world. Railroad companies did not always believe in the power of standards but eventually came together for big contracts and their rewards. Next Friday I will lead a discussion at Bloggercon IV about the affects of standards on the lives of users. How…

Conference WiFi is a marketing play

I’m at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego with some cool new applications and services being announced on stage and in the hallways. The problem is, no one is able to blog about what’s happening in real-time due to an almost non-existant network connection (even for presenters wanting to live demo). A thought for conference organizers: wireless connectivity is part of your marketing budget. It allows the audience to research products and sponsors, connect to other attendees to arrange meetings and get-togethers, and enables more people to attend knowing they will be able to simply connect back to the…