Thanks to Ray Strackbein for posting to SpeakerNet News details of a fascinating free visual online dictionary.

SnappyWords.com might well replace your dictionary and Thesaurus in ways you could never imagine. It packs a lot of information on one easy-to-navigate page.

Look up any word and SnappyWords presents a visual dynamic network of all related words and their definitions.

Here’s what you see when you enter “Speech” as a search word:

Explore the meaning of words and gather suggestions for alternate words with a few simple mouse clicks.

1. Place the mouse cursor over a word to view the meaning.
2. Double click a node from the branch to view other related words.
3. Scroll the mouse wheel over words to zoom in or out. This helps you see more associations or view words and meanings more clearly.
4. Click and drag a word or branch to move it around and explore other branches.

It’s fun to experiment with place names. Here’s the results for London:

Candid Camera

Springwise reports that a wearable camera has been developed in the UK which can document a person’s life. Promising “Memories for Life” the Vicon Revue has been created as an aid for people with memory loss.

The device can operate either on a timer—taking photos every 30 seconds—or it can be set to take photos automatically when triggered by internal sensors, which can detect body heat as well as changes in temperature, light and motion. Along with images, the camera also stores a time-stamped log file that can be enriched with GPS traces. Its 1GB of flash memory can typically hold around 30,000 images, or approximately 6 days’ worth of capture.

The appeal of the Vicon Revue is expected to broaden from Alzheimer’s patients who need a photographic record of events they might otherwise forget to anyone narcissistic enough to want to record as much about every moment of their life as possible.

So, if you were to stick one of these devices on a newborn and they lived to be, say, 70, then 4.3TB of disk storage would hold their entire lifetime in pictures. You can actually buy that much storage for around $700. What are you waiting for!

Life Caching

Springwise terms this emerging trend Life Caching and notes:

Thanks to the onslaught of new technologies and tools, from blogging software to memory sticks to high definition camera phones with lots of storage space and other ‘life capturing and storing devices’, an almost biblical flood of ‘personal content’ is being collected, and waiting to be stored to allow for ongoing trips down memory lane.

One possible future is that all of us will soon have enough of our lives recorded that no-one, least of all ourselves, will have the time or inclination to review the data we’ve collected. If you cache 100% of the life you lead for 24 hours, and proceed to review it, then the next 24 hours would be a cache of you reviewing your cache. Our lives would recede like reflections in a hall of mirrors, as we viewed ourselves viewing ourselves. Our self-obsession would become magnified.

Technology is already causing this to happen to some of us. I’ve collected 27 days worth of music on my iPod, most of which I’ll probably never listen to. I have countless folders filled with digital photographs I never look at and a blog with over 500 articles that I hardly ever read.

So what’s your point (of view)?

The end-game of this technology might well be a time when each of us holds a cache of our separate lives and yet is unable to make any more sense of it than we do of our unrecorded life. In fact, if everyone did this, life would become infinitely more confusing.

What would it be like to play back all the images from even a half-dozen lives, lived wearing a Vicon Revue? Imagine a group of people in the same family or people who worked together all recording their separate points of view. What would this tell us? How would we even begin to make sense of it? Imagine they spent time together in the same room—what would it look like?

Not knowing what anything IS

This question has been addressed by Avatar Adi Da Samraj, who writes:

If each person’s “point of view” were replaced by a camera, and you collected photographs of all those “points of view” in the room—up, down, sides, all different orientations—and if you put them all together, you would wonder what you were looking at. Ten such photographs would be enough to make the room unrecognizable. In any case, no single photograph represents the room in its totality. Any single photograph is a portrayal (or an abstract representation) only—and the same is true of your perception. Your perception is only a portrayal (or an abstract representation) of the room. Your perception is not the room As it Is.

— The Way of Zero Bargaining, The Aletheon, p. 1590, Avatar Adi Da Samraj.

Adi Da discusses the profound implications of this fundamental truth. He explains that neither a single room, nor the whole universe, can be accurately described, since “knowledge” about anything is limited by a “point of view”:

“Point of view” defines everything about conditional “knowledge”, whether it is “knowledge” of “self” or “knowledge” of the universe. That is the purpose served by “point of view”. That “knowledge” is the power of “point of view” - its presumed ability to escape bad luck, misfortune, confinement, death, bad results, negative destiny, and so on. That presumed power (or ability) is the purpose of the effort of introversion. It is also the purpose of the effort of extroversion. It is the purpose of all seeking.

— The Aletheon, p. 1591-2.

Understanding Life

So, perhaps a better option than obsessive life caching and a concern with squirreling away the minutia of every moment, is working to develop an understanding of life as it really is; not as an archive of separate images, but as a totality that transcends all possible “points of view”.

How to augment your live presentation using social media

Effective public speaking is a challenge for many executives. They must prepare interesting content, overcome stage fright and deliver a speech that will hold the audience’s attention. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, they are increasingly likely to find themselves looking out at a sea of faces illuminated by the glow of laptops and PDAs. Social media is invading the auditorium, and rather than tuning out while a speech is delivered, people are turning on laptops and cell phones to send out text messages, broadcasting to the world their opinions of a presentation.

Changing presentations forever

In his new book, The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever, Cliff Atkinson explains how these new forms of online communication are shifting the rules of engagement between audiences and presenters. Instead of sitting politely until it’s time for Q & A, people are going online during the address to swap comments and opinions via an electronic backchannel.

At the very least, Atkinson claims, speakers and their communications support staff need to be aware that there is likely to be a backchannel in the room and learn how to monitor it or be left out of the conversation. Beyond this basic awareness, he encourages communicators to take the initiative and employ social media as an integral part of any executive’s presentation.

Practical advice

Atkinson’s book covers a lot of ground, from how to open a Twitter account to advice on expanding the conversation with the audience. He details how social media can transform a presentation from a one-off information dump into a longer-term relationship—one that starts before you step onto the podium. His advice includes:

• Breaking a speech into “Twitter-sized chunks” to make it easier for people to post 140-character sound bites. One measure of success then becomes how many of these summary statements are posted and reposted online.
• Using Twitter as a vehicle to extend your ideas to people outside the room, giving them a “virtual stage pass” to the event.
• Creating instant polls using tools, such as Twtpoll and Poll Everywhere, to involve the audience.
• Publishing a Presentation Home Page using wiki software. For example, I was inspired by Atkinson’s book to create http://execcomms.wikispaces.com/ listing my past and future talks. A Presentation Home Page is a convenient archive for reference material; blog postings; a Twitter feed; bio and contact information and more. This shifts the burden from overly busy PowerPoint slides as the sole way to communicate information. Also, by implementing a page like this prior to an event you initiate a backchannel that involves the audience, letting you gather comments and suggestions before you deliver the talk. After the event, the page becomes a repository for evaluation responses, blog postings, reference material and a transcript.

Double-edged sword

Atkinson acknowledges there are both risks and rewards involved in the backchannel. It enables people to connect online and become part of a shared community, but at the risk of leaving out those who are unaware of what is happening. It gives the speaker a way to reach a wider audience, but at the risk of distracting the smooth delivery of material. It provides an archive for comments and opinions, but a series of 140-character notes can lack context. And there’s the very real risk that the comments people make on Twitter might lack civility and shock presenters with their sometimes brutal honesty.

A two-way conversation

Though this approach is not for everyone, Atkinson describes a potent way in which social media allows a (frightening?) new level of transparency that speakers can use to transform a one-way stream of communication into a dialogue with the audience—before, during and after the speech.

The Backchannel might not bring welcome news to presenters who are wedded to the old school ways of controlling audience response and involvement, but is clearly shows how you can magnify the impact of a speech using social media.

So, in the spirit of the book, what do you think are the risks and rewards of a social media backchannel? Leave your comments below or tweet them with the hashtag #backchannelbook.

This review was originally published in ragan.com.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

Steve Jobs is the exception to the rule – a corporate executive whose product introductions captivate audiences as powerfully as the best motivational speakers. He’s a college drop-out whose eloquent 2005 Stanford University Commencement address has been watched by more than 4 million people on YouTube. What’s the source of his eloquence and what are the presentation secrets of Steve Jobs? Carmine Gallo answers these questions in his impressive new book.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is a book that a speechwriter can love. Gallo quotes from sources such as Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology and Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen. He even has a sidebar on JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen’s influence on Barack Obama titled “What the World’s Greatest Speechwriters Know.”

The message of this book is that Jobs’ extraordinary impact is based on his authenticity and his passion for his company’s people and products. Most presenters can’t claim to be the CEO of an archetypically cool Silicon Valley company. Neither can they get away with wearing faded jeans, sneakers and a turtleneck onstage. But simply everyone with a product or service that improves people’s lives has a story to tell. Gallo’s book explains in detail how Jobs presents his story so that his passion shines though and ignites the audience. It’s Gallo’s claim that anyone can learn how to deliver an “insanely great” presentation.

The “secrets” that make Jobs so effective onstage include the usual stage tips taught by presentation coaches: Make eye contact with the audience, use vocal variety and know the power of a well-timed pause. But the majority of the book analyzes the structure, rather than the delivery techniques, of major keynotes Jobs has given at Macworld and elsewhere over the years. This makes the book of inestimable value for anyone who needs to understand the nuts and bolts of writing a speech.

Performance Piece

When Steve Jobs takes to the stage he often tells dramatic stories, so it’s appropriate that the book itself is structured as a three-act play. Act 1 tells how to create the story, Act 2 tells how to deliver it, and Act 3 stresses the importance of rehearsal. Gallo adds “Director’s Notes” that summarize each chapter (or scene), and he introduces a cast of supporting characters. Organizing the book in this way also reinforces the importance of telling a story in three parts; of delivering a speech with three messages. In fact, Gallo concedes, the chapter on the effectiveness of breaking a speech into three “could easily have become the longest in the book”.

Speechwriters’ playbook

The book is a playbook for writing a great speech. Jobs and his team start scripting a speech long before firing up PowerPoint or, in their case, Keynote software. They settle on an attention-grabbing headline (“The world’s thinnest notebook”); then they decide on the three key messages; develop analogies and metaphors; and scope out demonstrations, videos clips and cameo guest appearances. Next they develop the “plot” of the speech, setting up an antagonist (Microsoft or IBM in the early days), dressing up numbers and including plenty of “amazingly zippy” words. Finally, they script a memorable “holy smokes” moment that people will talk about long after the event ends. The slides they eventually create are heavy on images and light on text and bullet points.

Live Action Video

But a book alone will only go so far. If you’ve never actually seen Steve present in person, then you haven’t experienced the “reality-distortion field” his charisma and eloquence creates in the auditorium. Gallo has this covered. The book’s end notes provide URLs for some of the 47,000 YouTube and Apple.com video clips showcasing Jobs and clearly demonstrating the techniques discussed. These links are also available on Gallo’s Web site. Viewing the videos compensates for the rather poor-quality monochrome photos of Jobs onstage — the one disappointment in the book.

Learning from his mistakes

To counteract any feelings of inadequacy you might have after watching Jobs deliver a flawless keynote, do a quick search on YouTube for Apple Bloopers and you’ll see that, even for Steve Jobs, things don’t always go well onstage. Demos fail, screens freeze, and he stumbles over words. But as with any masterful presenter, Jobs remains calm. Even if the speeches you write or deliver are not destined for “insane” greatness, they’ll be much, much, better for having read Carmine Gallo’s insanely great book.

This review was originally published in ragan.com.

Are you new to Social Networking? Is everyone at the local coffee shop telling you that you should be on YouTube?

YouTube is a phenomena. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that YouTube is more popular than Facebook and Twitter:

“…the share of online adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006.”

In order to enjoy YouTube to the full, and be able to post comments and responses to the videos you watch - and upload your own Flip video creations you have to create an account. It’s not at all difficult. Simply go to http://www.youtube.com and sign up.

This brief video from my colleague Jim Carrillo explains how to do this in easy steps.

It’s all part of the Practical Social Networking service we offer.

Are you new to Social Networking? Is everyone at the local coffee shop telling you that you should be on Twitter?

Twitter drives people crazy. They can’t see what the point is. Think of it as a micro blogging tool - you can post and read brief (140 character) text posts. Twitter is a tool that will help you make connections with people that you will never have known before existed. More to the point, it’s a vast library of thoughts, opinions and information on the things people have conversations about: from pro sports to basket-weaving, Javascript to Jamaican vacations.

But before you can join in the conversation, you have to create an account. It’s not at all difficult. Simply go to http://www.twitter.com and sign up.

This brief video from my colleague Jim Carrillo explains how to do this in easy steps.

It’s all part of the Practical Social Networking service we offer.

Are you new to Social Networking? Is everyone at the local coffee shop telling you that you should be on Facebook?

Facebook is not just for teens and college kids any more.It’s a social s networking utility that connects people with friends and professional colleagues. You can share photos and create your own profile where you can keep your friends updated on your activities.

But before you can make new contacts, you have to create an account. It’s not at all difficult. Simply go to http://www.facebook.com and sign up.

This brief video from my colleague Jim Carrillo explains how to do this in easy steps.

It’s all part of the Practical Social Networking service we offer.

Are you new to Social Networking? Is everyone at the local coffee shop telling you that you should be on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn strengthens and extends your existing network of trusted personal and professional contacts. It’s an online networking tool that helps you discover inside connections to jobs, business opportunities and people with like-minded interests in many areas.

But before you can make new contacts, you have to create an account. It’s not at all difficult. Simply go to http://www.linkedin.com and sign up.

This brief video from my colleague Jim Carrillo explains how to do this in easy steps.

It’s all part of the Practical Social Networking service we offer.

Back in August 2008 I wrote a long review of the Magcloud print-on-demand publishing solution from HP Labs.

Since then I’ve helped produce a number of editions of Professionally Speaking for our local National Speakers Association (NSA) chapter as well as a magazine for my wife’s College Admissions Counseling business.

I was recently invited by Dick Bruso of the Writers and Publishers Professional Expert Group (PEG) of NSA to deliver a one-hour teleseminar on Magcloud. The teleseminar was given on May 21, 2009.

The teleseminar covered three areas:

1. A background on printing on demand for magazine publishers
2. The mechanics of producing your own magazine for free
3. Some examples and my own experience of the time and effort involved.

Websites referenced in my talk

Magcloud
Professionally Speaking
Georgia Speaker
Step Into College
Two Words
Issuu

To hear the teleseminar click on the podcast icon below. Since this is a 55 minute recording you may prefer to Download and listen at your convenience.

 

 Magcloud Teleseminar [55:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate

Postman tells it like it is when it comes to the bind in which social media has placed many corporate communications managers. He addresses the challenge that “Inside companies, people are clearly confused about social media” (p. 160)

This book goes a long way to dispel any confusion. It’s chock-full of checklists, questions to consider, case studies and options to review. The guidance he gives is grounded in what is clearly first-hand experience of the corporate world. For example, this advice on selecting who should represent a company on an officially sanctioned blog is right on the money:

“Choose your bloggers well, counsel them, monitor them, and if need be, shut down their blogs if they are not posting in a way that helps you meet your communications objectives. But try not to censor them ahead of time.” (p. 65)

If you work inside a corporation and need to encourage co-workers or the suits in management to consider the options presented by social media, this is the book to leave lying around the office to stimulate discussion.

From the politics to the technical details and the straightforward PR and communications counsel the book covers a lot of ground. It also manages to be a complete inventory of social media, circa January 2009.

One inevitable problem any book on a subject as fast-moving as this will face is a limited shelf-life. In a few years it might seem impossibly quaint. But for now, there’s no better guide to new territory. As Postman says on the last page “Start Now!”.