Ten most popular posts on this blog

Yesterday I noticed that my post was number 399. This one is number 400! It’s a good place to stop and look back at the ten most popular ones so far.

#1 on the list, with 1930 page views is The power of brief speeches: World War I and the Four Minute Men. Its popularity probably is due to a mention on Scott Berkun’s web site. I started corresponding with him when he’d asked who originated the silly business of imagining your audience naked. He’d asked that when he was writing Confessions of a Public Speaker. I have ranked the other top nine posts relative to this one at 100%.  

#2 is a post on The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from? There are much better surveys about what people fear, but this one has gotten stuck in the popular imagination for so long that it has become a worn out cliche. The  subtitle of this blog is from fear to joy, so this takes care of the fear part.

#3 is a post on Finding topics for speeches. #4 is one on Two types of speech outlines: speaking and preparation. #5 is one on Introducing a speaker. These three are straightforward educational posts.

#6 is a post on Herbal remedies for anxiety, in which I noted that there is little if any evidence that these substances are effective.

#7 is a post with a Pearls Before Swine comic strip on rehearsing. It poked fun at the silly advice to practice your speech in front of a mirror. This one (and #10) take care of the joy part of my blog subtitle.

#8 is a post repeating advice to Do some jumping jacks before you rehearse your speech. My 300th post about How ideas can fly noted that this advice about warm-up exercises had bounced around the world via the Web.

#9 is a post on why you should Add your unique perspective to a topic. It discussed using some images from Wikimedia Commons to update and personalize a canned educational presentation. Originally it had a few bullet-pointed PowerPoint slides that descended from ancient overhead projector transparencies. 

#10 is another post about a cartoon, a Dilbert one concerning PowerPoint induced coma.  

Probably the most bizarre thing about this list is that 3 of the top 10 posts (including #1) all came from just one month - August 2010.