A useful Top 20 List of blogs about public speaking and presentations

On Thursday, November 6th, at his Presentation Hero blog (aka La Fabrica Della Realtà) Matteo Cassese posted his list of Top 20 Presentation and Public Speaking Blogs - 2014 edition. It includes several that I have not been following so far, and now plan to browse.

But, he didn’t mention the obvious - which is that you can view headlines for the five most recent posts on half of them just by going to Alltop Speaking. That site lists his #1, #3, #11, #12 (usually), #14 (titled as PowerPoint Tips Blog), #15, #17, #18 (titled as Jim Harvey’s Presentation Skills Advice), #19, and #20. Alltop also list four he had mentioned under the title of The Long Tail of Public Speaking Blogs: Nuts and Bolts Blog, Michelle Mazur Blog, Professionally Speaking, and Make a Powerful Point.

I was amused by his omission of Alltop Speaking, because his Presentation Hero blog appears there on the bottom line, under the title of La Fabrica Della Realtà.

The image was derived from one about Saving Daylight.    

Fairy tales in my blog spam folder from four turkeys

Some people will comment almost anything to try and get a link from this blog to their commercial web site. Here are some examples from the past six months. (Of course, any blog built in Google Blogger runs just fine with Internet Explorer. Why wouldn’t it?)

“Hello, neat post. There is an issue together with your web site in Internet Explorer, could check this. IE nonetheless is the market chief and a big element of folks will leave out your wonderful writing due to this problem. My web site is...”

“Hmm is anyone else having problems with the pictures on this blog loading? I’m trying to find out if its a problem on my end or if it’s the blog. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. My web site:...”

“Hi, I think your site might be having browser compatibility issues. When I look at your site in Ie it looks fine but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping. I just wanted to give you a quick heads up!...”

“Have you ever considered about adding a little bit more than just your articles? I mean, what you say is fundamental and everything. However think of if you added some great photos or video clips to give your posts more ‘pop’! Your content is excellent but with pics and videos, this site could definitely be one of the greatest in its field. Great blog! Look at my homepage...”

The sliced turkey spam and can were posted by Carol Spears on Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty useful blogs on presentations

In a December 13th post on his All About Presentations blog Vivek Singh asked for a short list (10 to 15) of useful blogs about presentation.  I easily thought of ten just from the United States. However, I read many more and thought it would be more useful to include another ten from the rest of the world. My list of twenty follows.

UNITED STATES
Nancy Duarte: Duarte blog

James Feudo: Overnight Sensation

Ellen Finkelstein: PowerPoint Tips Blog

Tom Fishburne: (Marketoonist)

Denise Graveline: The Eloquent Woman

Rich Hopkins: Speak and Deliver

Nick Morgan: Public Words

Scott Schwertly: Ethos3

Jon Thomas: Presentation Advisors

Jerry Weissman: Power Presentations

CANADA
Andrew Dlugan: Six Minutes

Dave Paradi: Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog

INDIA
Vivek Singh: All About Presentations

ISRAEL
Jan Schultink: Idea Transplant

JAPAN
R. L. Howser: Presentation Dynamics

Garr Reynolds: Presentation Zen

NEW ZEALAND
Olivia Mitchell: Speaking About Presenting

SPAIN
Conor Neill: The Rhetorical Journey

SWITZERLAND
John Zimmer: Manner of Speaking

UNITED KINGDOM
Max Atkinson: Max Atkinson’s Blog

Ten great posts from 2010 that you might have missed

Last month when I was writing about the ten most popular posts on this blog I noticed that only four of them were from 2010. Since there were 149 posts in 2010, there were many more great posts, from which I’ve selected these ten:

1. How thin is “extremely thin”? discusses clearly explaining something very small that is responsible for making stainless steels work.

2. Add visual interest to your public speaking presentation with balloons, and other inflatable props describes how useful these items can be. It is an example of how you always can add your unique perspective to a topic. Tom Antion had two posts long ago about balloons, and mentioned that he’d owned an entertainment and balloon delivery company.

3. Why less is more - or even less talked about how that minimalist aphorism is a half-truth.

4. Boring subject, or just a boring speaker highlighted Shirley Schwartz, whose brilliant writing made the topic of motor oil fascinating.

5. What stories are you carrying in your pocket? discussed how the contents of your wallet or purse held numerous impromptu speech topics.

6. Would you buy a used car from these men? cautioned that first impressions may be completely wrong.

7. Web search: 10 strategies for various occasions outlined ways to find information online.

8. Small and large props that will improve your presentation can be found in numerous places.

9. What should we really be afraid of for Halloween? discussed the diseases and other events that most likely will cause our demise.

10 “All Speaking is public speaking,” or “there is no such thing as public speaking”? used Google Books to trace the idea that public speaking is an enlarged conversation back to a century ago.

Looking back at two years of blogging about public speaking

After two years and 256 posts, it is time take a look back. Based on my labels, the numbers of posts for the top 30 topics were:

39 - Fear
29 - Social anxiety (social phobia)
27 - PowerPoint
26 - Visual aids
19 - YouTube
18 - Storytelling
15 - Surveys
13 - Graphics
12 - Joy and Toastmasters
11 - Research
10 - Planning
9 - Stage fright
8 - Rehearsing and Body language
6 - Films, Gestures, Humor, Speech topics, Top lists, and Video
5 - Blogs, Churchill, Color, Evaluations, Introductions, Jargon, Naked audience, Props, and Speech titles

The blog title promised both fear and joy, but there has been much more on fear. The biggest surprise on the list was having a series of five posts about picturing the audience naked. There have been many thoughtful comments and a few silly ones.

Why do I write this blog?

This is my virtual platform for speaking to the world. It got started last year when I agreed to take over as Vice President-Education for the Capitol Club, the Toastmasters International club I belong to here in Boise, Idaho. I wanted an easy way to share information with the members of my club (and anyone else beyond who wanted to learn more about public speaking). This month I began my second one-year term as Vice President-Education. So, I expect to keep writing for another year. This is my 125^th post.

Why didn’t I just write articles in my club or District newsletter? In the past couple years the club newsletter has been sporadic. District 15 has an online Newsletter called The Pulsebeat. I wrote a brief article for the Spring 2008 issue, but the archive disappeared when the District 15 web site was redone. However, that article became one of my first blog posts, and you can find it right here.

The blog also has lots of links to other useful articles. Like Woodrow Wilson, “I use not only all the brains I have, but all I can borrow”.

My interest in Toastmasters had been rekindled by Cleon Cox when I lived in Portland. Cleon had added a blog to the web site for his Job Finders Support Group. My blog post about elevator speeches,What do you do that can help me?, was a guest post on Cleon’s blog. A printable version lives over here on Cleon’s web site. Two more of my articles about job search there are about magazine articles and university web sites.

I read it in the newspaper, so it must be true

One common way of winning points in an argument is to research your topic, and then to quote from an authoritative source. Last year Peter Rickards, a podiatrist in Twin Falls, Idaho tried this. He wrote a Reader’s View (a long letter, basically a guest editorial) that was published in the September 25, 2007 issue of the Idaho Statesman. That Boise newspaper has the largest circulation in the state of Idaho. His Reader's View was titled “Gillespie's blowing smoke about nuke plant”.

He disagreed with the proponent of a nuclear plant who had been saying that it would not emit anything harmful. Dr. Rickards quoted the physician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott as saying that: "Tritium, another biologically significant gas, is also routinely emitted from nuclear reactors. Tritium is composed of three atoms of hydrogen, which combine with oxygen, forming radioactive water, which is absorbed through the skin, lungs and digestive system.”

Dr. Rickards got that quotation from an article that Caldicott had written in another newspaper, The Australian, back on April 13, 2005. Her statement about tritium is chemical nonsense. Actually it is a single atom, not a cluster of three. About a week after The Australian published it she was corrected by some of their readers. In her reply she agreed that actually: "Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen composed of two neutrons and one proton". You can find the UPI version of the revised article here.

That original Caldicott article confused the notations used by physicists with those used by chemists. A molecule of hydrogen gas is composed of two atoms, not three. The chemical formula for that molecule is written as a capital H followed by a subscript of 2.

The physicists notation for the isotope of hydrogen called tritium has the capital H preceded by a superscript of 3. There also is deuterium, another isotope of hydrogen composed of one neutron and one proton and denoted by a capital H preceded by a superscipt of 2. A regular hydrogen atom has one proton and is denoted by a capital H preceded by a superscript of 1. Perhaps Dr. Caldicott slept through that day of her physics or chemistry classes.

Less than an hour after Rickards’ letter was published several caustic comments were posted on one of the Statesman’s blogs pointing out the error. They came from over in eastern Idaho, which most people think of primarily as where potatoes come from. However, eastern Idaho also is home of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). INL is one of the world centers of nuclear technology and originally was called the National Reactor Test Station. Some folks out there not only know about isotopes, they also produce them in the Advanced Test Reactor.

Rickards backpedaled and replied on the blog that:
“To Bubblehead- Gillespie claims nuke plants are ‘emission free,’ and that is simply not true, as born out by the EPA fact sheet. On your point that tritium is not 3 Hydrogen atoms, as Dr Caldicott phrases it, I believe you are semantically correct, it is better to say ‘Tritium, or H-3, is actually one hydrogen atom -- one that contains one proton and two neutrons’."

As far as I know the Statesman has never printed a correction. Also, quotes of the original, uncorrected article by Caldicott still are out on the web here and there.

So, a newspaper article may be a source of ignorance rather than a source of knowledge.

Caldicott's 2006 book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer correctly refers to tritium as being an isotope of hydrogen, but then (on page 56) denotes it by a capital H followed by a subscript of 3. She also describes tritiated water by H3O, where a chemist would of course correctly call it H2O.

Your presentation style should match both your intent and the size of your audience

This January, on his Extreme Presentation Method blog, Professor Andrew V. Abela discussed the difference between TWO presentation idioms. One he calls a ballroom style presentation, and the other a conference room style presentation.

He said that a ballroom style presentation is used when the objective is to inform, impress, or entertain the audience. The information flow is primarily one way (from presenter to audience). The audience is typically in a dark hotel ballroom. More generally the audience size could range from a few dozen people to several thousand. PowerPoint slides typically are the medium used.

In contrast, a conference room style presentation is used when the objective is to engage and persuade your audience to change their behavior. The information flow is a two-way interchange between presenter and audience. The audience is typically in a well-lit, small conference room. The audience size could range from 2 to 25 people. Written handouts typically are the medium used.

Two years ago he described this distinction in a magazine article on how to Achieve Impact Through Persuasive Presentation Design. He shows a nice table comparing the two idioms.

In September he detailed both idioms in a 17-page Change This manifesto entitled Presenting to Small Audiences(switch off the projector).

On November 5, in his Slides that Stick blog, Jan Schultink instead described THREE distinct presentation scenarios (and desired levels of detail): the Keynote (large), the Pitch (medium) and the Meeting (small). (Jan showed a matrix which also distinguished three styles for where the media are used without the presence of a presenter).

An article by Cliff Suttle on how to Size Up Your Audience appeared in the December 2007 issue of Toastmaster magazine. Mr. Suttle distinguished FOUR different delivery styles for different audience sizes:

Talking to 10 people or fewer is a conversation.
Getting up in front of 20 people is a speech.
If there are 40 people in the audience, it’s a performance.
100 people or more is a show.

Are there TWO, or THREE, or FOUR different styles? I suspect there actually are many MORE. Most of us do not frequently encounter a large range of venues with vastly different audience sizes.

For audience sizes ranging from one to about a million, the following table shows we might distinguish a spectrum with twenty distinctly different optimum styles (as described by a series of powers of two). The first column shows the exponent, E, the second the resulting audience size, and the third a typical presentation venue.

E, audience size, and a typical venue
0 - 1
1 - 2
2 - 4
3 - 8 = a conversation in part of a room
4 - 16
5 - 32 = a school classroom
6 - 64
7 - 128 = a university lecture hall
8 - 256
9 – 512 = an auditorium, or theater
10 - 1,024
11 - 2,048 = an opera house
12 - 4,096
13 - 8,192
14 - 16,384
15 - 32,768 = a basketball arena
16 - 65,536
17 - 131,072 = a football stadium
18 - 262,144 = the Indianapolis 500, or a NASCAR race
19 - 524,288
20 - 1,048,576

A buffet of blogs about public speaking

In a post back on June 6 I mentioned that Andrew Dlugan had discussed 106 blogs about public speaking.

There is an interesting tool for keeping up with a large number of blogs about speaking and other topics. It is called Alltop and was announced back in March by Guy Kawasaki. He called it a news aggregation site that collects “all the top” stories for popular topics on the web. There is a separate page you can go to for each topic.

For each topic Alltop collects postings from about forty to eighty different sites. For each site below the name it shows the headline and title of the five most recent posts. When you point your mouse at a headline you will see the first paragraph of each post. If it looks interesting, then you can click on a headline to read the entire post.

The Alltop page on speaking is a bountiful buffet which collects material from 79 different sites, including 5 with PowerPoint in their titles, and 3 with Toastmasters in their titles.

The page on writing has material from 24 sites, and the page on sales has material from 74 sites. However, their marketing page has over 200 sites. I think there were 213, but I may have lost track.

The alphabetical list of topics has some surprises. Under C there is California, Chicano, Christianity, Country Music, and even Cricket. The L’s include both Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Under N there is both NBA Basketball and NFL Football, but not NASCAR. Y’all aren’t from down South, are y’all?

A Hundred Blogs About Public Speaking

How many blogs are there about public speaking? In January Andrew Dlugan looked around and found over a hundred! He categorized them in a long post in his Six Minutes blog http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/ that you can find at: http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/2008/01/04/public-speaking-blogosphere/ Andrew also is doing a weekly review of articles from those blogs. What a wonderful service!

Last week I was looking on the web for information about humor in public speaking. I found that Andrew’s post listed four blogs on the topic of Speech Humor. He also listed a dozen Toastmaster blogs. More recently Andrew has been discussing the ten speech topics in the basic Toastmasters manual on Competent Communication. So far he has done the first three. Stay tuned to Andrew for the rest of them!