SpeakHQ Blog

(Seattle) Presentation camp schedule up!

By Berkun | March 25, 2009

Saturday April 4th Kathy Gill and I are running the first ever Seattle presentation camp, an unconference for people interested in all forms of public speaking, presenting, and pitching ideas. We’ve posted the core  schedule with some of the sessions that we know will take place, as well as plenty of slots for unconference style…

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The top 100 speeches of the 20th century

By Berkun | March 10, 2009

As research for my bestselling book on Public Speaking, I listened to dozens of famous speeches. I found a list of the top 100 speeches of all time and worked my way through it, making the following observations: We have technology bias.  Since we don’t have recordings of, for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Jesus’ sermon on…

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Stupid things presenters do (and how to stop them)

By Berkun | March 8, 2009

Duncan Davidson has a nice post listing several annoying habits some conference presenters have. Duncan of course notices these things since he’s often paid to photograph speakers, and these things make that more difficult than it should be. He includes several good ones including my favorite: Please take off your name tag. This is self…

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How to visually capture a talk or presentation

By Berkun | March 4, 2009

One of my favorite things at Adaptive Path’s MX event this week was how they had designers assigned to make large drawings based on the current talk, as the talk was happening. It was real time art/design/creation – super cool. Here’s Teresa Brazen’s drawing of my talk, Why designers fail: The cool thing is that…

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Does public speaking matter in 2009?

By Berkun | March 4, 2009

I find YouTube fascinating from a “how much things change yet stay the same” perspective. We love to talk about how different the world is than the pre-internet days of say 1989, but when I look at YouTube I see lots of video of people speaking in public. Lectures, talks, monologues, etc. Yes, it’s true,…

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