For the fifth time, I’ve been at Gnomedex this weekend. It’s the usual melange of fascinating speakers, good friends and general nerdiness. Derek aptly described it as “a web society annual family reunion”.
I’ve been collecting a few of the better quotes I’ve heard over the past two days, and thought I’d share:
Phil Plait: “You know what you call alternative medicine when it works? Medicine.”
Phil Plait: “Your lips say 0, but your eyes say 1″.
Todd Friesen: “Pay Per Click = PPC = ‘Pills, Porn, and Casinos’”
Chris Brogan: “Twitter is a good way to tell the world what you’re thinking, before you think about it.”
Jim Ray: “Are there any Django or Python hackers in the room? Well we got the guy who invented Django. So [with a certain gangster pose], what?”
Jim Ray: “Every journalist in the country discovered Twitter on January 15 of this year.”
Chris Pirillo: “Does anybody still use Second Life? [A very quiet room] One person?”
I flew to Toronto this week. One flight out, two flights (hello, bizarre sculpture in Calgary airport!) on the way back. While checking in at a terminal, uh, in the terminal, I glanced at the seat selection screen. There were plenty of other seats from which to choose. The seat next to me was empty on all three flights.
Julie was down at Granville Island today. It was a gorgeous day, and that place is usually teaming with tourists in the summer months. She was surprised how uncrowded the island was. She easily found parking.
We recently used Hotwire to book a four-star hotel in downtown Seattle for Gnomedex. The conference occurs over a weekend in August, surely a popular time of year for tourists visiting the city. We’re paying US $99 a night.
I know these are all isolated anecdotes, but they confirm what I’ve been reading over the past few months: fewer people are traveling shorter distances. Here’s some empirical evidence. Between March, 2008 and March, 2009, the Canadian Tourism Council reports an 11.5% reduction in the number of trips to and within Canada. That probably represents the entire profit margin for a lot of hotels, travel agencies and related services.
As a matter of curiosity, I checked which countries were showing the greatest decline in trips to Canada. The percentages reflect how many fewer visitors came in March, 2009 compared to March, 2008:
United Kingdom - 24%
Japan - 24%
South Korea - 23%
Mexico - 21%
Of course, most foreign visitors to Canada are from the US, where travel is only off 5.9% between March, 2008 and 2009.
In any case, I guess it’s all good news for the consumer, and pretty bad news for anybody in the travel industry.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and was inspired to get it done by Merlin Mann’s recent piece about improving his use of PowerPoint.
I do a lot of presentations. Each time I give a talk, I try to improve on something. I have a good base on which to build thanks to an unlikely education. Despite my career in technology, I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Theatre.
I learned a lot of good public speaking practices from theatre school. They come in two flavours–content and technique:
Content - What You Say
Respect the Narrative Arc. Every good story has a beginning, middle and end. The beginning promises the audience something, the middle threatens to take that promise away, and the end pays off on the promise (or, in the so-called ‘third act twist’, it doesn’t).
Tell Stories. If you take one piece of advice from this article, it’s this. We make meaning by telling stories–to ourselves and each other. If you can construct your entire talk by embedding your points in a series of anecdotes and tall tales, do it. You’ll entertain your audience a lot more, and your message will be much stickier in your audience’s heads. Watch Seth Godin speak–he’s all about the clever anecdotes.
Embrace Metaphors. Metaphors are another important means of how we make sense of the world. Use similes (”this site is eBay for seniors”).
Dialogue Starts on the Page. I find my talks are much more cogent and compelling when I’ve written them as informal essays first. Then I try to commit as much of it as I can to memory, and write out the key points on index cards. Too many speakers seem to think they’ve prepared a talk by creating some slides. The slides should come last.
Slides are Your Costumes, Lighting and Set, Not Your Speech. Your slides exist to reinforce the things you’re saying, not the other way around. Like your clothes, they provide context and framing for your message. As such, I almost always eschew bullet points for a single word or phrase per slide, accompanied by lots of photos. An overly complicated set will distract an audience, and so will overly busy slides.
Your Set Design Needs Soul. Use lots of photos in your slides, but pick photos with soul. You’ll know them when you see them. Here’s a tip–there’s more soul on Flickr than iStockPhoto. And avoid obvious illustrations. You don’t need to show two generic hands shaking to imply a relationship. I recently gave a talk that included a brief summary of the history of communications–from few-to-few to few-to-many to many-to-many. These are the three photos I used:
The Play’s As Long As It Needs To Be (or Not To Be). People like to say “you shouldn’t have more than five (or 15 or 23) slides”. This implies that there’s a standard duration for each slide, and that you’re a simpleton. When you don’t use bullet points, this rule no longer applies. In one of my talks I run 60 slides–all photos–in about 3 minutes, and other slides sit up on screen for five minutes while I’m making a point.
Surprise Your Audience. We’re delighted when the unexpected happens. Change gears midstream, take your theme in a new direction, or show a little video in the middle of your talk. It piques the interest of the audience and refreshes their attention. Everybody perks up when the ghost of Hamlet’s dad returns in Act 3.
Begin In Media Res.It’s Latin for ‘in the middle of things’, and a lesson from Playwriting 101. Start in the middle of the action. Start with an anecdote out of left field, and let the audience catch up later. Don’t be afraid to use a flashback to fill in the background in the middle of your talk.
Find the Funny. This is dangerous, because there’s nothing worse than a joke (or a joker) that bombs on-stage. If you’re not a naturally-gifted comic, find other ways. Embed humour in your slides, bring a prop or gently abuse the audience. I recently used a volunteer and a prop in a talk:
It’s hardly a stroke of comic genius, but it can change the tone for a few minutes, which never hurts.
Technique - How You Say It
Go to a speech coach. Why do British actors always sound smart? Because, usually, they’ve got superb vocal training and are exceptionally articulate. Discover all the muscles in your mouth, throat and chest dedicated to speaking, and learn how to exercise them.
Warm up your voice. You stretch before playing pickup hockey–why don’t you warm up your voice before putting it through the paces? Your speech coach can help with this. As part of my pre-speaking ritual, I spend about ten minutes conducting an embarrassing vocal warm-up before speaking. I try to do it backstage, in an empty bathroom or in some other out of the way corner.
Quit moving around. It’s a common bad habit of the young (and, in my case, really awful) actor. When you’re not rooted firmly in one place, you water down your message and distract the audience. Stand in one spot, and move only to emphasize a point.
Talk slower. You’re almost certainly talking too fast. Even if you have a complete handle on your nerves, there’s a lot going on during a talk–slides, distracting audience members, and so forth–and people take longer to absorb information. Practice slowing down until people tell you that you’re talking too slowly.
Consider Your Pacing. That said, you don’t always have to talk slowly. The speed at which you speak is just another tool–be sure to use it. Speak quickly for comic effect, or to emphasize the complexity of a process.
Wield the Pause. Playwrights often write (Pause). I’ve used it as a lazy transition, and a way to notify the actor that a speech’s tone or subtext changes. You can use a pause in the same way–implying a shift from one section to the next. More importantly, the skillfully-wielded pause sharpens the audience’s attention, and builds anticipation of your next point.
Costumes Matter.I keep saying this, but here it is again: clothes are costumes, and costumes are powerful symbols. Whether you’re speaking to six of your colleagues or 600 strangers, your clothes matter. They offer both context and subtext for what you’re speaking about. People are looking at you for a while–even if they don’t process your clothes consciously, they’ll do so in the background cycles of their brain. Guy Kawasaki spoke after me at Gnomedex, and he wore this cool, casual shirt and jeans. Maybe that’s a carefully crafted image, or maybe it’s just what he threw on that morning, but it says a lot about who he is as a speaker.
In short, make your presentations a little more like a play or a film. A little creativity and humour goes a long way, so don’t overdo it. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who described entertainment as “the jam that coats the pill of morality”. Your pill is probably more education or marketing than morality, but the lesson applies. Entertain your audience, and they’ll buy more of whatever it is you’re selling.
I know my site gets a little Gnomedex-centric for a few days around the conference every year, so thanks for your patience. I’ll be done with this stuff soon.
Each year at Gnomedex, I spend less time in the auditorium listening to talks, and more time in the hallways chatting with other attendees. That’s always been the real value for me, and I was pleased to see a bunch of familiar faces and meet some new ones. I just wrote a big list of and linked to all those people, but have since deleted it, as it just felt like useless name-dropping.
Brace for the Gonzo
I always describe Gnomedex as a ‘conference of ideas’, and this year was no exception. However, this year’s program was more questionable than previous conferences, and was book-ended by a couple of highly-suspect talks. I missed most of Robert Steele’s talk, but if I distill the on- and offline reaction, it can be charitably summarized as “gonzo”.
Sterling Allen’s closing talk on ‘open source energy’ featured, among other things, a gratuitous misuse of the term of ‘open source’. He spent plenty of time discussing dubious energy sources that he aptly put in a big bucket labeled ‘crackpot’. If they’re so nutty, why did he spend much of his talk covering them (without, in my view, sufficient skepticism). I was shocked that nobody from the audience called him on it.
Open Money, Open Lives
My favourite talks were Vanessa Fox’s discussion of a life lived online–she skillfully facilitated a lot of conversation with the audience–and Michael Linton’s talk on open money. Michael has some powerful ideas, but I think he needs clearer, simpler metaphors to explain them. The talk unnecessarily went over the heads of a lot of smart people in the audience. I probably only understood about 20% of it, but that was enough to be intrigued. My appreciation of Vanessa’s talk only grew once she revealed herself to be a Joss Whedon evangelist.
Far too much has already been said about a battle of wills between two of our industry’s biggest egos. As one friend put it, “it wouldn’t be Gnomedex until a couple of old white guys started yelling at each other”. I don’t really mind the actual exchange inside the auditorium–I’ve been one of those guys in the past. I do resent that it spills over into the blogosphere and occupies everybody’s attention for the following 48 hours.
It was a nerd fight, folks, and nerd fights ought to be like removing Band aids or the invasion of Poland–swift, painful and over with quickly.
Speaking of egos, I wanted to link to a few comments on my talk for posterity:
I don’t much enjoy watching those, but it’s useful if one wants to improve. I was clearly a little too jittery to start with, but think I eventually settle into things. It’s a tough room, frankly, so I’m reasonably happy with the result.
Chris had some folks doing cartoons of conference stuff. I quite like this little piece they did of my talk:
Thanks to the folks at MyFridj for the cool drawing.
And last but certainly not least, it was a joy to see Derek’s smiling, thirty-foot tall head during his video chat session. It must take great courage blog about his illness, but I suspect it takes even more to talk about it in real time with his friends and colleagues.
UPDATE: Joseph Thornley kindly did a little interview with me after my Gnomedex talk, and has posted it.
On Saturday night, I dropped by a little Gnomedex after-party at a local pub. For reasons I can’t recall, I talked about a movie that involved a broad-shouldered alien antagonist who killed people with flying CDs.
I pretty much asked everybody that I talked to at the event, but nobody could place it. Lee, to his credit, introduced the idea that it might have starred C-grade action hero Dolph Lundgren. Even some iPhone-powered web searches proved fruitless.
It took me a few minutes, but I eventually found the film on the Web when I got home: I Come in Peace. A plot summary:
An intergalactic alien drug dealer (Hues) comes to earth with a peculiar MO on the fritz. The duder causes human beings to overdose on smack and then sucks the endorphins out of their heads with the intention of selling the fix on his home planet. Yup, you heard me…that’s the plot and I’m sober as I write this. With Dolph Lundgren (playing Jack), spastic Brian Benben (playing Laurence) and a space cop with bad hair on his intergalactic tail, our “peaceful” alien friend has his hands full.
If I recall correctly, when Dolph slays the alien at the film’s climax, he says something really clever like “you go in pieces”. That’s right up there with “we’ll always have Paris”, isn’t it?
Depending on the topic and audience, I sometimes first write my talks as essays. It helps me clarify my ideas, and imagine the talk’s pacing and tone. I subsequently distill the essay down to some bullet points on index cards, and refer to them as needed during the speech.
There’s some video kicking around, and I’ll post that and the slides when it shows up online. I’ve embedded a few photos from the slides into this text where they’re pertinent.
One
A few years ago my grandmother passed away. I recently found this telegram among her possessions. It’s from her uncle to her father. If you can’t read it, it says “Dad died yesterday. Burial Tuesday, two o’clock, Aurora.”
That economy of language. You paid by the word, so condolences could wait until next Tuesday.
This was sent in 1954, and at the time it cost about $2.50 Canadian. That’s about $2.57 in US dollars. Yes, our currency was stronger until about 1960. I don’t know if you’ve looked at exchange rates lately, but we’re coming for you.
In 2007 dollars, $2.50 is worth $19.84 Canadian. Imagine if you had to pay nearly two dollars for every word you wrote in an email. What would spam look like?
Send $ to Nigeria. Thx.
If we think of it in some different ways, $19.84 in Canadian dollars is also…
$18.64 US dollars ¥2,214 Japanese Yen £5.84 in Maltese Lira (I’m living in Malta right now, so I like to convert to the local currency)
Do you hear that sound? That’s half the room hitting up Google Maps to find out where Malta is. It’s here, incidentally:
It also works out to…
L$4,986.62 Linden dollars 249 World of Warcraft Gold
The second number is black market, so rates may not be very stable.
My great-great grandfather dies. My great-grandfather sends a telegram to my great-great uncle. My grandmother keeps the telegram. She dies, and I get it.
It’s enough to make you think about your own mortality. Read more…
As attendees know, about 80% of the Gnomedex audience has a laptop open in front of them. Most of them (myself included) aren’t taking notes most of the time. So what are they doing?
At a couple of different times today, I walked around the back of the room, looked over people’s shoulders (from a, uh, respectful distance) and took a straw poll of what Gnomedex attendees seemed to be doing. These are the results:
Browsing random web page: 17
Coding or viewing terminal window: 11
Twitter: 11
Microsoft Outlook: 9
Microsoft Word: 8
Google Reader: 6
iPhoto: 5
Gmail: 5
Flickr: 5
Google Search: 4
Facebook: 4
Blogging: 3
Skype: 1
Pownce: 1
Okay, I’ve finished my Gnomedex talk, and so can begin to chill out after an extremely nutty 72 hours. A few random notes from the past few days:
Big carry-on bags are one of my air travel pet peeves. It seems like about a third of all travelers bring a bag onboard that, according to the rules (which seem to never be enforced), is too big. On my flight home, somebody was trying to wheel a rolling bag down the aisle, and it was too wide! That ought to be a clue that’s it’s over-sized. Is the 15 minutes wait for your checked luggage that vital to your life?
Kudos to the local MacStation. On Tuesday, I bought another MacBook to replace our other aging PowerBook. I brought it home with a busy evening of work planned. I turned it on, and it was totally b0rked. Hilariously, when I started it up, it just played the Mac startup tone over and over and over again. Even when I closed the laptop. I was in a big hurry when I returned it the following morning, but the folks at MacStation took care of me and swapped laptops (and my added RAM) immediately for one that worked.
A big thanks to Ianiv and Arieanna for giving me a lift down to Seattle. We had a two-hour wait at the border, but I brought treats, so it was okay.
I was surprised to feel quite sentimental about coming back to Vancouver. The day after arriving, I woke up early and walked downtown over the Cambie Street bridge. It was a joy to look at a textured, cloudy sky, smell the cedar from the docks under the bridge, and hear the cries of seagulls. I felt more sentimental in part, I think, because Malta is far more different from Canada than Ireland was.
I haven’t had a Slurpee or sushi yet. I must get on that.
Yep, the urban planning of Seattle still licks.
Yep, those are cows behind me. It’s actually a country road, because I made an awful joke about John Denver, related to this project.
