How to Prepare for a Conference Speech Using by the Social Web
As many of you know, I have been invited to give a speech for Outdoor Writer’s Association of America during their annual convention in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Although I have degrees in threatre and telecommunication, and am accustomed to speaking in front of crowds, I have never presented at a conference before. So, let’s consider this Creepy Sleepy Conference Speech beta 0.50.
The OWAA is flying me down for the early part of next week to deliver a presentation on so-called New Media. The “voice of the outdoors,” the OWAA is a professional organization of writers, broadcasters, educators, and outdoor companies. Their affiliations range from media organizations like Tony Dean Outdoors , National Geographic, and Field and Stream, to professional organizations like the NRA, to various conservation organizations like the Indian Creek Nature Center. Topics discussed will range from The Impact of 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on Wildlife and Wildlife Habitat Along the Louisiana Gulf Coast and The Changing Landscape of Newspaper Outdoors Journalism: Adjusting to the Internet and Other Media Outlets.
I’ve been told that this conference will be attended by newly re-elected mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin, as well as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, so the opportinuties for politico monstering could be considerable.
I’ve been asked to speak on “Money in New Media: Blogging and Podcasting” (their title, not mine). I’ve known about this speech for quite some time, and over the past few weeks have done a significant amount of research and preparation. As blogging and podcasting are fairly inherent to web 2.0, I decided several weeks ago to make this a very ’social web’ presentation. I know it’s not exactly Creepy Sleepy fare, but I plan to deliver this speech as a live podcast. It will probably drop into your aggregator as Creepy Sleepy Show 57 on the 20th or 21st of June. Additionally, I have utilized many social web devices to help myself prepare. This post will be a brief summation of a few different sites and software that I’ve used in preparation.
Interface:
Never did I expect another browser to unseat my beloved Firefox. However, as much as I love loading Firefox up on fantastic extensions, Flock has proven itself to be the ideal social web browser. I’ve been surfing on Flock since the beta 0.4 release and have come to both embrace and rely upon it’s utilization of blog integration, RSS, news reading, tagging, and photo uploading. For more information on Flock, check out this definitive review of Flock Beta 1.
Research and Presentation:
To prepare for this speech, I have done a lot of research online. Back in the analogue days, this would require numerous trips to the library and university, and piles of photocopies. I probably present the speech on a fuzzy overhead projector. While analogue research has its merits, this speech is about the web, so I chose to use tools such as Open Office and Google Spreadsheets for composition. Of course, the entire speech will be saved as an OO doc, and saved in my GMail account. As this speech will be delivered as a podcast, I will use Audacity for pre and post-production audio editing, and Castblaster for the presentation itself.
My research has primarily been done on Flock as I troll the Interwebs. Flock allows me to save web snippets - pages that may be temporarily relevant - and provides for easy organization. Additionally, Flock provides fantastic integration with del.icio.us (and/or Shadows), which will allow me to store my reference and research pages online, tag them, and share them with the OWAA community.
Needless to say, Technorati has been a fantastic resource for discovering content on outdoor management issues.
As Lake Charles was fairly battered from Hurricane Katrina, I will also be documenting the event via cell phone. I’ll post pictures taken from my phone directly to my Flickr account, and have been using Flickr to gain some visual context to the region.
Blog and Podcast Creation:
As this speech will be on Blogging and Podcasting, it will be important to convey the simplicity of establishing a blog. Personally, I advocate Wordpress and their famous five minute install. Now, this may be a bit advanced for some, but after some server space is purchased it’s a fairly painless process.
For the beginner who does not want to worry about hosting, domain names, and the like I recommend Google’s Blogger. Not only is it easy to set up an account and choose an attractive template, the AdSense integration is, as you would expect, very simple. Although has its detractors (myself included), it may be the impetus for many to start blogging. Of course MSNSpaces and Yahoo360 offer similar competing products.
I will most likely record the speech through a combination of a PC laptop and my trusty iRiver H140. Although the device is no longer made, a simple search of Amazon or Froogle will surely yield several products that offer line-in recording or have an internal mic.
Again, I’ll be using a combination of the free, open-source .wav editing program Audacity for pre and post production, and Castblaster for the speech itself. The new version of CastBlaster is GREATLY improved over older beta versions. While I don’t recomend the program for anyone who simply wants to dabble in podcasting, it is a fantastic tool for the dedicated podcast producer and is well worth the investment. as well as the $50 PodShow podcast creation application Promotion Via Social Networking Sites: Immideatly after the speech, I will mix down the audio. I’ve designed the speech around a loose ‘hotclock,’ and plan to use some Creepy Sleepy production as well as PodSafe music. My hope is that by approaching the speech as podcast/show (”Hi! I’m Dan, from the Creepy Sleepy Show, welcome to Creepy Sleepy Show #57!) rather than a ’speech’ (”Hi! I’m Dan and I’m here to talk about blah blah blah…”) I’ll be able to show what a podcast is about, rather than tell. Any way, as soon as the show is mixed (and who knows how the audio will turn out - that’s why this speech is a beta), uploaded, and added to the feed I’ll hit the various social networking sites. These include our MySpace, Facebook, and Odeo.
PodShow:
The launch of PodShow+ is imminent. I suspect that sometime in early July the public will have access to a lot of PodShow’s features. I’m not sure how much I’m at liberty to say, but having used the site every day for the past four months I’m pretty jazzed about the launch. Aaron Burcell and Richard Brewer-Hay have been remarkably helpful in providing information about the PodShow+ site, and how it can benefit many different demographics. I’ve tailored this speech for the OWAA demo, but once the site is launched its utility will be obvious. PodShow+ will make subscribing to a podcast incredably simple. Additionally, the site will make disseminating information across the podiosphere remarkably easy. Although this isn’t a ‘traditional’ (whatever that is) Creepy Sleepy Show, I’ll be utilizing many of PodShow’s features to spread this particular show as widely as possible. Although a lot of information contained in this speech (as with any speech at a conference) will be fairly basic to most Creepy Sleepy subscribers, I hope that this speechcast will prove to be useful for explaining the medium.PodShow+ will also provide a means for podcasters to monitize their craft in a way that flips the concept of advertising on its head. Check out the AdChallenge site for more informaton. The GoDaddy promotion is also fairly innovative. (Shameless plug! If you’re buying domain names or webhosting, enter Creepy1: save 10% on any order - Creepy2: $5 off an order of &30 or more. Creepy3: Get a .COM domain name for $6.95). Anyway, PodShow has made it easy for me to develop an interal buzz withthin the podcasting community.
This list isn’t entirely comprehensive, but hopefully it will provde a mini roadmad as to how one (okay,I) prepare for a conference by relying primairly on the web. There are a ton of things that can - and probably will - go wrong (read: bugs), but to borrow from Google, this speech is currently in Beta.
Your suggestions, questions, and comments are greatly welcome and appreciated. Prior to the speechcast, I will publish my shownotes/hotclock/speech outline. I hope that taking an open and experimental approach to the development prep process will prove to be useful and enlightening.
tags:OWAA, Outdoor, Writer, Association, America, PodShow, AdChallenge, Earthkink, GoDaddy, Odeo, Castblaster, Conference, Lake, Charles, Flickr, SSocial, Networking, web+2.0
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Great overview. I enjoyed the links to other sites which gave me good information. Go for it!