Kevin Shockey shares some thoughts on speaking at OSCON. Well worth reading for anybody who plans to speak at a conference. Especially the observation that many speakers only finish their talk at the last minute seems very true. I have the same problem. And I can also recommend Damian Conways “Presentation Aikido” tutorial which I attended at last years EuroOSCON.
Many presentations at conferences aren’t all that compelling. It would have worked equally well to read something about the subject in a book or on the web. But for some subjects there is no alternative to a video or even life presentation.
I recently stumbled over a recording of the talk Web Accessibility - a users perspective by Darren Fittler at the Webstock conference. Darren works as a lawyer and website accessibility consultant and he is blind. In this fascinating presentation the audience can see and hear what it is like to surf the web with a screen reader and how important good website design is to help visually impaired people. There are audio and video recordings in several formats available, see for yourself.
I have read through web accessibility guidelines before and tried to make my web pages not suck totally in that regard, but actually seeing how websites are browsed by blind people gives me a whole new perspective.
In her blog face2face Sue Pelletier talks with Mike May about speaker selection. His idea is it to have a speaker database used by all speakers in the world which includes as much background information about speakers as possible, including video clips, photos etc. Conference organizers use it then for finding and selecting speakers as well as for getting promotional material for their event.
I think this is an excellent idea and wish somebody would start this…
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