One of the best, free, resources for speakers is the weekly SpeakerNet News email newsletter sent each Friday to more than 9,000 professional speakers, consultants, trainers, and authors.

Each issue features items sent in by the newsletter readers, including:

• Tips on subjects like sales and marketing, travel, technology, great resources, saving money, PR, conducting better presentations, and other topics key to the speaking business.
• Requests for information and advice.
• Want ads (equipment and other items for sale).
• Services and products of interest to speakers.

There’s an extensive series of compilations of past tips on topics ranging from How to Handle a Noisy Audience to suggestions on Bartering with Hotels and Recommendations for PowerPoint Designers.

SpeakerNet News is run by long-time NSA Northern California Chapter members Ken Braly and Rebecca Morgan.

They host a series of Teleseminars featuring well-known authorities such as Randy Gage on Transforming yourself from Speaker to Information Entrepreneur, Michael Soon Lee on Becoming an Industry Expert…In A Week and James Malinchak on Making Six-Figures Annually Speaking to Colleges.

I recommend subscribing to the teleseminar series which slashes the cost of each recording from $25 to a mere $10.

The ghost of Camelot visited the Ragan Speechwriters Conference on Friday morning. JFK speechwriter, Special Counselor and man who lived a life at the edge of history - Ted Sorensen - delivered the closing keynote. The audience of 300 speechwriters was privileged to see and hear the world’s most famous speechwriter share his insights into Kennedy and the craft of speechwriting.

I sat in front and filmed the entire 30-minute keynote. These four YouTube videos comprise 99% of what Sorensen said.

In this first segment, he applauds the return of eloquence to political life in the USA and recognizes the importance of “just words” as the tools leaders use.

Interesting article on how to drop the Powerpoint crutch and win people over from the heart of industrial America - Reliable Plant magazine.

Quotes Paul LeRoux, the co-author (along with Peg Corwin) of Visual Selling: Capture the Eye and the Customer Will Follow

LeRoux counsels using images not text to connect with the audience.

E Pluribus Unum - Out of One, Many
HP Labs Pluribus - Out of Many projectors, One super-screen

Super-bright, large-scale, and very high-resolution digital projectors are indispensable tools of modern communication. They help CEOs wow audiences of analysts. They make rock concerts intimate. They turn computer gaming into a spectator sport. And they can make digital cinema an instant reality.

They are also very expensive. Prices for high-end projectors run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which keeps these devices from being widely used.

HP Labs’ Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata had a hunch they could make a much cheaper projection system by combining the outputs of several smaller projectors to create a single, high-quality image. They work in the Multimedia Interaction and Understanding Lab in Palo Alto on a project code-named Pluribus.

Seeing Pluribus in action, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the huge, crystal-clear picture it creates. Hook a 16-foot screen up to a game of Madden NFL Football, for example, and the players are life-size - putting you front row and center at the same scale as the real thing.
Although Pluribus looks great, its true appeal lies in the cost savings it offers anyone in the business of projecting large images. How so? For example, Pluribus can combine ten off-the-shelf projectors costing $1,000 each to project an image as bright and sharp as that created by a single high-grade projector costing $100,000.

Once this technology reaches your local Best Buy it will cause the prices of what is possible with high-end home theatre to be reset to a new price-point. You’ll just have to be patient. Hear Nelson and Niranjan discuss their work in the podcast.

 

 Pluribus - Video Projection on Steroids [4:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the most popular break-out sessions at this weekend’s National Speakers Association Conference was a three-hour session presented by Michael Benidt and Sheryl Kay on social media and the “Hidden Treasures the Internet”. A standing room only crowd was treated to a fire-hose of information on everything from advanced Google search tips to ensuring the audience can see the relevant information on a slide by using SnagIt. Not to mention advanced tips on blogging and podcasting, how to use Creative Commons to grow your business and much more.

It was apparent from the questions the audience asked that many NSA’ers are social media novices.

So rather than stick around to ask Michael and Sheryl comment on their class, I caught up with some of the audience and asked what were some of the opportunities and challenges presented by this plethora of social media tools, and what practical steps they planned to take to incorporate them in their existing businesses.

The most successful NSA members have the designation of Certified Speaking Processional (CSP) and CPAE (Speaker Hall of Fame). So I was thrilled when, despite a voice which was not in top form (an occupational hazard for NSA members!) Marjorie Brody, CSP, CPAE, agreed to give me her take on how she plans to incorporate these tools into her very successful speaking business.

To hear what an admitted “social media novice” has to say, click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Interview: Marjorie Brody [2:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I can think of better ways to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon, but I had no choice but update my Wordpress software on my web site today.

My ISP was no longer going to support some older software the Wordpress version I installed in November 2005 uses. So I spent 2 hours backing up my blog, deleting the original version and then upgrading to the latest version.

Tedious stuff, and something people who use a blog hosting service don’t need to ever worry about.

But having the blog on my own server hopefully drives traffic (and the all important Google page rankings) to my site.

I also took advantage of the upgrade to switch my ‘Permalinks’ from a numbered entry to a title - something Google also likes.

All this has left a few things broken, my Blogrolls did not display at first, after a couple more hours experimenting they do, but without the all-important description. I will fix this soon.

The end result should be that I’ll have the ability to install some of the more recent plugins for Wordpress - such as one I need to allow me to launch a podcast feature on my blog.

Let me know if you find anything ‘broken’ in my blog so that I can fix it pronto.

Joan Fox was buried on December 20, 2006.

She was my mother-in-law, someone it had been my privilege to know for nearly 20 years. She was buried in the village graveyard in Mungret, Ireland. She’d lived her whole life within 20 miles of her birthplace. Yet she’d traveled the world: Hawaii, Russia, California and her beloved Florida. She’d married Charlie when she was only 22 and he was 34. His job with TWA at Shannon allowed them the free travel. Her daughter Sandra benefited, visiting the Bay Area, where we met.

Over 300 came to Joan’s funeral that week before Christmas. Farming families who had known her since she was a child. Friends from the airlines. The wide circle of people in the West of Ireland who she’d touched.

At the funeral Mass she was described as a lady. When Sandra was at boarding school some of the other girls thought she was film star when she came to visit.

The death notice in the Irish Times read:

FOX (nee O’Brien) (12, Thornbrook, Corbally, Limerick and formerly of Conigar, Mungret) - December 17, 2006, after a short illness borne with great courage and dignity, at Milford Hospice, Joan, beloved wife of Charles and dearly loved mother of Sandra and Richard, sister of the late Mary (Herlihy) and Derry (Moloney); deeply regretted by her son-in-law Ian, daughter-in-law Deirdre, her beloved grandchildren Evan, Emily, Jamie and Neil, brothers Michael, Gerard and John, sister Geraldine (Costelloe), extended family, relatives and friends. Rest in peace. Removal from Milford Hospice to St Nicholas Church, Westbury, Corbally, tomorrow (Tuesday) evening at 7.30 o’clock Requiem Mass on Wednesday at 12 Noon. Funeral afterwards to Mungret Cemetery.

At the end of the Mass I read a short essay by Adi Da Samraj:

What Is More Than Wonderful Is Not Threatened

Fear of death is fear of surrender to Infinity.
Learn to surrender, to exist at Infinity while alive, and fear of death dissolves.

Fear of death is fear of the Unknown.
Realize the Eternal Unknowability of the Totality of Existence, and fear of death is transcended in the Feeling Beyond Wonder.

If Happiness (or Freedom) depends on the Answer to the Question, then there can be no Happiness (or Freedom).
The Question cannot be satisfactorily or finally Answered.
For one who Abides at Infinity–Happy and Free, at ease with his or her Ultimate (or Divine) Ignorance–the Question and the Answer are equally unnecessary.

What began will come to an end.
What is More than Wonderful is not threatened.
The Process of the Totality of Existence is Transcendental, Inherently Spiritual, and Self-Evidently Divine–and it is Eternal.
Only a fraction of the Whole can pass away in any moment, since only a fraction of the Whole appears in any moment.
Therefore, the True Divine Heart Itself is Always Already Full of Love and More-than-Wonder.

“I” is the body-mind, the fraction of the Whole that is now appearing and will soon disappear.
“I” must be surrendered to the True Divine Heart, to the Whole–Which Is Infinity, and Love, and More (and More) than even Wonder knows.

Easy Death, page 97.

I feel like the proverbial latecomer to the party, but I’ve just discovered the wonders of YouTube.

This is a social Web site that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. The tagline is “Broadcast yourself”. It was founded in February 2005 and has experienced phenomenal growth. 65,000 sub-10 minute video clips are uploaded and 100 million clips are watched each and every day. It’s estimated the company’s bandwidth costs are $1 million a month.

So what did I find so amazing about the site?

It was not the excruciating amateur home video, the garage bands, frat parties and stupid pet tricks. But buried in those million clips is content that I relish:

So here, as a total indulgence, is three minutes of Roy Harper, who is an obscure and wonderfully poetic chap with a guitar and an attitude, celebrating One of Those In England:

and here is, literally, a trip down memory lane, an abstract wonder of out-of-focus home video of a Cheshire road I cycled every day from the age of 11 to 18 with the hoar-frost clinging to the hawthorn hedges:

Explore YouTube - you never know what you might discover!

While it’s hardly earth-shattering, I was able to gain exposure on the BBC for some of my blog content this week when I sent an email to BBC Radio Scotland’s Iain Anderson. His weeknight show is an absolutely wonderful collection of music I adore: Dylan, Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, The Pogues, even some Roy Harper.

When I heard him discussing the fact that Homeward Bound had been written on Bradford Railway Station, I sent him a link to my blog on that topic, and he read it out, pretty much verbatim, to all of Scotland who were still awake and listening at 12:15am.

If you’d like to hear this, choose the Listen Again button for Wednesday’s show. The content is only archived until April 5th. Then the next Wednesday show bumps it.

Radio Scotland. Music worth listening to.