You’ll notice the format of this post is a little different. I decided to participate in a blog carnival which my colleague Angela DeFinis is hosting on her site.  The theme of the carnival is “ Public Speaking and The Holidays ” – check out Angela’s post about the carnival . 

Last year Chris Brogan talked about the elements of a good LinkedIn recommendation.  Of course, I have my own thoughts on this.  So, this week on The Public Speaker I talk about how to write better LinkedIn recommendations.  Here are the highlights but if you’d like to listen to the full details go here :

This past weekend I went to my first story slam. I was laughing the entire night. What great fun.  But I also learned quite a good deal about effective story telling. While I was listening to the stories, I kept thinking about what Ira Glass says are the three most important elements of story telling. 

Recently I read an article on BNET by Steve Tobak that talked about how to be a good manager .  Steve mentions the importance of being adept at five things: finance, selling, presenting, negotiating, and business communications. I thought his grouping was odd. 

In my experience, when presentations (or training sessions) go horribly wrong, the root cause almost always boils down to one thing: The presentation didn’t resonate with the audience because the material wasn’t specific enough for that particular audience. Unless you take steps to adapt the material for your participants, you’re guaranteed to have a problem.

TED has earned a lot of attention over the years for many reasons, including the nature and quality of its short-form conference presentations. All presenters lucky enough to be asked to speak at TED are given 18-minute slots maximum (some are for even less time such as 3- and 6-minute slots). Some who present at TED are not used to speaking on a large stage, or are at least not used to speaking on their topic with strict time restraints.

Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. "Lateral Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception," says de Bono. Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking

Most people do not really think about design and designers, let alone think of themselves as designers. But what, if anything, can regular people — teachers, students, business people of all types — learn from designers and from thinking like a designer? And what of more specialized professions?

Presenting while people are tweeting is challenging – but also adds a new dimension to the presentation experience for your audience. Gradually tools are being developed to make it easier for you as the presenter to manage the backchannel. I

People often ask if technical or science-related presentations can be as compelling as presentations covering other less technical topics. Now, not every presentation has earth-shattering, Nobel-Prize winning significance, but I assume if you are talking about your research or current issues in your field, etc. that your words have a benefit for someone else.