3 Speaking tips for wired audiences (Small Biz Survival) – "2. Put a copy of your presentation online ahead of time. If the projector or video fails, all those with laptops in the audience can pull it up and flip through it with you. This one was suggested by @digitalandy when the computer controlling the [...]

Clothing distractions and malfunctions (Speak Schmeak) – "I have some outfits that look great on me when I'm standing, but not so great when I'm sitting. I know that now and take it into account when I'm preparing myself for a gig. Also, it's a good idea to have a couple of safety pins in [...]

spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective (apophenia) – A week before the conference, I received word from the organizers that I was not going to have my laptop on stage with me. The dirty secret is that I actually read a lot of my talks but the audience doesn't actually realize this because scanning [...]

Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back (The Chronicle of Higher Education) – "Perfect conditions propelled this Twitter torrent: a speaker who delivered what was apparently a technically flawed and topically dated talk to a crowd of Web experts who expected better. They reacted by flaying him with more than 500 tweets in one hour. [...]

Cut off after 2 minutes (Speaking Energy: Adventures in Public Speaking) – "In the smaller room there are a lot more distractions as well. If my audience of one decides to do something else besides listen…well, my presentation just got a lot more difficult — and energy depleting. … The person I was speaking to [...]

The First Slide in Your PowerPoint/Keynote Presentation (Tod Maffin) – "About four years ago while giving a keynote presentation about leading 'the Facebook generation' in the workplace, disaster struck. I was about mid-way through the speech, talking about new models for employee benefit plans, when the following popped up on the screen — in front [...]

You Must Have a Good Sound System (Great Public Speaking) – "A humorous speech demands a better sound system than a serious speech. In a serious talk, words can be missed and the main message can still be very clear. In humor it doesn't work that way. If key words are missed in a joke [...]

All eyes on you — as you choke (Crain’s Chicago Business) – "But sometimes, getting past a disaster of a presentation can be freeing. One of Mr. Connellan's clients, an executive from a very large company, was asked to update 2,000 people at a conference. She was ready for the performance but froze when she [...]

Final act (leewochner.com) – "…but we had major ongoing tech problems, too. At the end of an 8-hour cue-to-cue rehearsal in which all the light and sound cues were programmed, they mysteriously disappeared. All of them had to be reprogrammed, which added nine hours onto the day. (I said, “I won’t be here at 2 [...]

Be the Duck: The Key to Calm (speakfearlessly.net) – "Most people, if rolling out a franchise product in front of thousands of people and something went wrong, would panic. But Jobs is a master. He casually said, 'Guys, the slides are stuck.' Then he made a joke about 'Somebody backstage is scrambling,' which everyone knew [...]