On Thursday evening I taught a class in podcasting at the San Francisco SBA office. I took the opportunity to ask the class members why they were interested in podcasting.
Click on the podcast icon below to hear what they had to say.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:59 — 463.9KB)
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On Thursday I taught a class on podcasting at the San Francisco SBA and Nicole volunteered to be interviewed.
She stood out in the class as the first one to raise her hand when I asked for a candidate who would like to be on a podcast. It’s not surprising when you read about her consulting business.
Nicole writes that her consulting business is all about:
Verdandi Consulting aims to be a unique, prominent provider of motivational and inspirational professional and personal achievement services to people worldwide. Its mission is “to be” in the business of helping people be their best, whether they are in corporate, small business, household, educational, retirement or other arenas.
Hear what she had to say about why podcasting is of interest to her by clicking on the podcast icon below.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:45 — 644.6KB)
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Wednesday evening I attended Edith Yeung’s SFentrepreneur networking session in San Francisco. I ran into Christina Poremski from the Technology Dojo.
A traditional dojo is a school for training in various arts of self-defense (such as Aikido or Karate). Christina and her partner created a Technology Dojo to train successful entrepreneurs and professionals in various arts of defense against wasted time and energy. Their philosophy is based on the ancient principles of simplicity, flexibility and maximization of strength.
The Dojo is a learning community where successful entrepreneurs and small business owners come to learn new skills and to master their tools. We host beginning and advanced classes, labs for hands-on practice, and a Mastermind group. Entrepreneurs and small business owners of all ability or skill levels can learn new ways to improve their businesses in an interactive and supportive environment.
To hear what Christina told me about this unique resource click on the podcast icon below.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:13 — 519.3KB)
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The Board of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSA/NC) is pleased to announce the release of our 3-minute Vision Statement movie:
This is our vision
we are dynamic speakers
a community
of professionals
we care for each other
and network with our friends
we have integrity
and high standards
we serve both accomplished
and emerging speakers
we educate others
about our profession
we make a difference
we use our expertise
our voices
and our stories
to make the World
a better place
we change lives
we teach
we inspire
we energize
we are open
we share our knowledge
and experience freely
there is enough
for all of us
we make the pie
bigger
together we are better
we believe in
cooperation above competition
we get paid
for doing what we love
we honor the privilege
of the platform
we are experts
who tell it like it is
we challenge our audiences
we move them
we stir them up
they change
they take action
they accomplish
great things
we make others
successful
we change the world
by speaking
that is our vision
My blog has featured dozens of podcasts, from informal 3-5 minute interviews to recordings of full-length presentations. I’ve podcast from the convention floor, the corner store and the podium.
I’m amazed that more professional speakers, trainers, workshop leaders and people with a message don’t podcast. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s happening now.
And it’s time I shared with people just what is involved in creating a podcast.
So I’ve scheduled three podcasting workshops between September and February.
Thursday September 18 from 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
SBA Entrepreneur Center, 455 Market St., San Francisco.
As part of the Gizmology series being offered by the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association and the San Francisco Small Business Association I’ll be teaching a FREE evening workshop in podcasting.
We’ll start the evening with a discussion about the advantages of podcasting. Do you want your voice heard around the world? To have people tune in and hear you without any extra travel? Podcasting does this. Simply by putting an audio recording on a Web site and then letting people subscribe to a “feed,” you’ll have a powerful way to build a worldwide listening audience. The highlight of the class with be a hands-on demonstration. I’ll record some of the discussion and show everyone, step-by-step, how to make this into a podcast which we’ll access from iTunes. It should be a lot of fun.
Although the event is offered for free, you do need to register.
Saturday, October 25, 2008 from 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM
Hilton Hotel, 333 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco.
This all-day workshop includes the same class I will teach on September 18, and more. BiztechDay is a packed with educational seminars, workshops and panel discussions by top technology and business experts (like me!) all focused on how to grow your business using the power of the Internet & Web 2.0 technologies. Check out more details.
Registration before Sept 15 is $149 / After Sept 15 is $249 – so what are you waiting for?
Click here to register.
Thursday, February 11, 2009 from 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
The Mayflower Hotel, Washington DC
Yes, in the very hotel that ex-NY Governor Elliott Spitzer chose for the tryst which ended his career and just a few blocks from the White House where President Richard Nixon recorded every conversation in the Oval Office (although I’m not sure he planned to use them as podcasts!) I’ll be giving a workshop titled Get more mileage for your work: Repurposing a speech for new media as part of the annual Speechwriters Conference.
This stellar event features keynotes by legendary JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen and Robert Schlesinger, author of the excellent history of Presidental speechwriters White House Ghosts.
The conference runs Feb 11-13 and my talk is part of the Advanced Speechwriting track.
This evening I spoke to 50 Officers of Silicon Valley Toastmasters clubs about the value of the National Speakers Association (NSA). My talk covered the history of the NSA; its focus on the business aspects of being a professional speaker and why NSA conventions are such valuable sources of information.
I shared with the Toastmasters the source for recordings of past conventions and encouraged them to consider purchasing relevant material for download.
I encouraged them to subscribe to the free weekly newsletter SpeakerNet News for information on a wide variety of topics of interest to speakers.
I listed the upcoming meetings of the Northern California chapter and invited them to attend. We finished the talk by raffling three free copies of our magazine Professionally Speaking. Those who did not win a copy but would like to read this excellent magazine can order one from the print-on-demand MagCloud website for $4.50 plus postage. Such a deal!
To hear my presentation in full click on the podcast icon below. Since this is 44 minute talk you might prefer to use the Download option and save the .mp3 file to your iPod for later listening.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:16 — 10.1MB)
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I never thought that a chance meeting on a Boston bus would lead to me having anything in common with Steve Forbes, Oprah Winfrey and Jann Wenner. But, like the publishers of FORBES, O and Rolling Stone, I’m now a magazine publisher.
It all began the day I met Udi Chatow, part of the MagCloud project team at Hewlett-Packard. We were attending the annual HP TechCon symposium. Udi told me how MagCloud enables anyone to publish a magazine. The team were looking for non-profit associations to test the service. As the President of the non-profit Northern California National Speakers Association I knew our association needed a showcase for members’ articles about public speaking. Within a few short weeks we had selected five articles, sourced some illustrations from a stock photo website and, with design help from Meghan Kennedy in HP Labs, created the inaugural edition. Professionally Speaking is a 20-page color magazine that’s available for purchase from magcloud.com. Best of all, there was none of the up-front cost associated with printing.
We announced the Summer 2008 edition of Professionally Speaking on June 13, 2008. Our Fall 2008 edition will be published in September.
MagCloud is a new business incubation resulting from collaboration between HP Labs and HP’s Corporate Ventures team. It’s where the world wide web meets the world of printing. MagCloud offers publishers the ability to take digitized magazines and economically promote, sell, print and fulfill them on demand.
It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud.com. The service lets you upload a high-resolution PDF and MagCloud takes care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management and more. The MagCloud website functions as a virtual newsstand, where readers can browse and, using PayPal or a credit card, order publications. The publisher specifies a markup on each copy sold, which MagCloud collects and pays the publisher at the end of each month.
MagCloud uses HP Indigo digital press technology to custom-print each issue when it’s ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no pre-publication expense. The resulting magazines are in gorgeous full color on 80lb paper.
This is a breakthrough for niche publications – the small ‘zines’ which form the long tail of the magazine publishing world. It’s also an interesting opportunity for large publishers. They are now free to experiment and create riskier products and see if they can find an audience.
The MagCloud development team is looking at much more than printing technology. They are researching the fundamental economics of magazine publishing. Team member and economist Kay-Yut Chen states:
“MagCloud is enabling a completely new kind of print economics. It is reducing the distance between the publisher, the subscriber and the advertiser compared to traditional magazines. In the traditional model, someone who wants to run an advertisement in, say TIME Magazine, has to engage in a labor-intensive negotiation with high transaction costs. The automation we’re building into the MagCloud system means even a very small publisher and small advertiser can do business cost-effectively.”
By simplifying all aspects of the publishing process MagCloud benefits publishers, subscribers and advertisers – making a whole Print 2.0 ecosystem much more efficient than the existing model.
The guiding principle of the project is that anyone can be a publisher. What they will do as publishers remains to be seen. “MagCloud is an enabling platform,” states Udi Chatow. “People are finding new opportunities that did not exist before. We don’t want to second guess what they will be.”
The project is still in early Beta stage. What this means in practice is that anyone can register on the site and browse and purchase magazines. Publisher capability is by invitation only, though rumor has it that invitations are distributed liberally. The reason is the development team is seeding a new market. They are looking for publishers who serve specific niches.
The world first heard about MagCloud when a couple of blogs broke the news in mid-June. Since then literally thousands of requests to publish have been received. They come from an astounding variety of organizations – from juggling associations to Stanford University athletics; from cartoonists to photographers.
Following a June 24th visit by 20 members of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association to HP Labs, SFentrepreneur founder Edith Yeung organized a visit by 40 members of her organization on August 21st.
The evening visit took in a talk by Udi and a tour of the Indigo printing press and a panel session where magazine publishers shared insights. I spoke about the experience of creating Professionally Speaking. Edith gave every member of the audience a complimentary copy of SFentrepreneur.
There was an incredible level of interest by these entrepreneurs. Many saw how a magazine could serve their niche.
The highlight of the evening was when the MagCloud team surprised us with a special 8-page souvenir magazine of photographs of the event they’d taken during the reception and tour. This is a great example of how MagCloud extends the boundaries of publishing. Training program managers and conference organizers can create just-in-time magazines for events.
Publishers can repurpose and monetize online and user-generated content. Printing costs are lower for small magazine and promotional runs of a few dozen, a few hundred or even a few thousand copies. There are automated web based ordering and print management services to take the headaches out of production. Financial transactions between buyers and the publishers are handled automatically to ease the flow of money to the bottom line. The site also offers a unique demand creation vehicle that publishers can showcase. It all adds up to the pleasure and prestige of seeing yourself in print at very low cost. It’s the people’s printing press.
Finally, it solves the back-issue problem for publishers. Virtual magazines never go out of print and readers can order any copy at any time from any where as long as it remains posted to magcloud.com.
Readers are free to enjoy a virtual magazine newsstand in the cloud. They can access a wide array of specialized and unique content in a printed magazine format that is not readily available elsewhere. If they find something they would like to order, it’s printed on demand and delivered directly to their mailbox.
By taking advantage of print on demand, magazines are only printed by people who actually intend to read them.. This is much more environmentally friendly than the current magazine industry where an incredible 60% of the 3.8 billion magazines delivered to news-stands in the USA are never sold (or read). That’s over 2.3 billion wasted magazines that end up in recycling.
This online marketplace of digital magazines holds the same promise as iTunes for music lovers. It allows readers the opportunity to sample content and purchase only what they need to read. iTunes means you no longer buy a whole album to just listen to a song or two. MagCloud means publishers have the opportunity to offer readers the option to just purchase the one or two articles they are interested in from any issue.
Imagine a future magazine marketplace where readers are free to create ‘mash-ups’ of content from a wide variety of sources. Magazines will be tailored from news articles, blog postings, book excerpts, event schedules, even friends’ recommendations for music, movies, books and more. The magazine is personal again.
No amount of marketing analysis can predict where MagCloud will go. Expect the unexpected. Variable print technology allows the freedom to experiment. “Every page can be different,” says MagCloud engineer Wei Koh. “A publisher is no longer limited to designing only one magazine. They have the option to personalize copies for each subscriber. This has exciting possibilities. We’ve only just scratched the surface.”
Consider a few options:
If you’ve read this far you are obviously interested in MagCloud. You probably have interests, hobbies, association colleagues or an attic filled with grandfather’s photographs which could be digitized and published. Perhaps your kids soccer team needs an end of season souvenir with articles and photographs. Or you could thrill your relatives at this summer’s family reunion with a magazine of the clan. Or perhaps you want to launch a magazine to support your neighborhood or other political campaign. What are you waiting for? Simply go to www.magcloud.com, and complete the request for a publisher invitation.
There’s a publishers guide that walks you through the process.
It’s available as a free download from the site, or for purchase as a printed magazine. What else did you expect?
Professional speakers are used to being introduced at large events by the disembodied announcer “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome…” known in the business as the VOG or Voice of God.
The idea that God speaks in an amplified, authoritarian, disembodied baritone is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition. It goes with the misogyny and long white beard.
However, there seems some basis in human development for this belief. Consider the opinion of Robert Lepage:
“the first voice that a child hears when it is in the womb is not the voice of the mother, because the child is part of the mother. The important voice that the child hears is the voice of the father: that’s the voice that changes where the child lives because it excites or stresses the mother. So when we come out we desperately try to put a face on that voice. And that’s intimately connected to the voice of God – or the absence of the voice of God.”
Lepage is the director of Lipsynch, “an epic nine-hour performance which spans 70 years and explores the voice as a compelling metaphor for human expression and interaction” currently playing at the Barbican theater in London. Sounds fascinating.
Since beginning his career in the video business in 1977, Rhys Ludlow has worked in field production, lighting, engineering, editing and producing. With a talent for clear communication with strong technical skills, his work includes national TV spots, specials, documentaries and corporate video.
Rhys’ work has been seen on all major US TV networks, at the Smithsonian and he edited the Academy Award nominated documentary “Last Images of War.”
His work on corporate promotional and educational videos include clients such as Chevron, Wells Fargo, PG&E, Pacific Bell, Hewlett-Packard, Autodesk, Visa, Dewitt Jones’ best selling motivational video, “Celebrate What’s Right With the World”, Jason Jennings’ 10-part series, “Productivity” and numerous demo reels for professional speakers. Examples of his work for speakers can be seen on his website www.media4speakers.com/
Rhys is taking the National Speakers Association Pro-Track class to better understand the business issues faced by speakers.
To hear his discussion on tips for speakers who want a video of their presentations, as well as his thoughts on the investment needed to become a professional speaker, click on the podcast icon below.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:36 — 1.3MB)
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Coverage of the Summer Olympics has included television reports of wonderful varieties Chinese cuisine. As the 2008 Games approached the Chinese government took it upon themselves to provide approved translations of menu options on offer in local restaurants.
This, according to an article by the wonderfully named Fuchsia Dunlop (a name I’ll never tire of!) in the Weekend FT.
She lists the literal translations of many Chinese dishes found on restaurant menus:
“Chicken without sexual life” (a young chicken)
“Iron flooring cremation” (cookies baked on an iron griddle)
“Pock-marked old women’s bean curd” (stir-fried tofu in hot sauce)
and “the fragrance explodes the cowboy bone” (no other translation given – my imagination runs wild…)
At the root of these amusing lists is not some Chinese inability to grasp the basics of English translation. Rather, the lack of congruence between Chinese characters and roman script impedes clear communication:
You can only go so far in borrowing from Chinese because beyond a certain level you have to know the actual Chinese characters to understand precisely what you are talking about. In Sichuanese cuisine, for example, there are two cooking methods that would both be transliterated as kao, but you can’t tell them apart unless you see the actual characters. The different characters for “salty” and “umami” are both rendered in the Roman alphabet as “xian “
The inability of one civilization to render the finer points of its culture into words that would be clearly understood by another is not limited to cuisines. Many social and cultural nuances are lost in translation – business arrangements; educational systems; humor, love, marriage and death. It’s made apparent when we see the literal English used in these menus. Official attempts to provide a standardized alternative are equally limited. Fuchsia Dunlop explains how these are:
…a pale reflection of one of the world’s most marvellous cuisines. Lyrical descriptive terms – like feicui (jadeite) for greenish foods, and guaiwei (strange-flavour, used for an intriguing combination of tastes) have been lost in the translation, and mapo doufu has severed its connection with the lovable pockmarked old dame of Chengdu. As Raymond Zhou wrote in the China Daily, this standardised translation is “a double-edged sword. It removes the ambiguity and unintended humour . . . But it takes away the fun and the rich connotation too. It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavour”.
As with food, so with business. Corporate communications either lose their flavor or suffer unintended mis-translations in the journey from West to East and back. This is all part of the rich tapestry of human life. Give me an exploding cowboy bone any day over the stark accuracy of the standard translation.
