February 28, 2008
Few things are more embarrassing for a public 
speaker than having a technical glitch hold up your presentation in front of a packed auditorium. That is unless you have comedian Robin Williams in the audience and ready to hop on stage to fill the dead air, as he did last night at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference in Monterey.
Kim Zetter, who reported on it for Wired Magazine, said she thought she was sitting in front of a heckler at the New Media Panel, when hearing Williams pretend that he was conducting a live news feed from his seat, and noting the irony that a show-stopping technical mishap would occur at a technology conference.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was on the panel, which made it easy for Williams to tie the Mountain View Googleplex into his impromptu act. As Wired’s Zetter reported:
If you walk into Google, you see everyone sitting on exercise balls, “which I think is how they’re hatching new employees.”
Some of the world’s most fascinating 
thinkers and greatest visionaries will be descending on Monterey, Calif., tomorrow to give the “speech of their lives” on social challenges facing the world at the annual Ted Conference.
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader, with the mission “to spread ideas that change attitudes, lives, and ultimately the world.”
Its speakers over the years have been the Who’s Who on the planet: From Bill Gates to Al Gore to Sergey Brin. But the real star speakers have been the unexpected, like Li Lu – the key organizer of the Tiananmen Square protest 1989. Or Patrick Awuah, a native of the African country of Ghana, who left his homeland as a teenager to attend college in the U.S., work at Microsoft for a decade, then return home to co-found a liberal arts college aimed at educating Africa’s next generation of leaders.
If you haven’t heard of the conference, it’s not surprising, because it’s always been by invitation-only and cost $4k. But last year, it relaunched its Web site – posting the best Ted Talks over the years.
It’s run by the Sapling Foundation, run by Chris Anderson, the founder and former publisher of Business 2.0 magazine. The foundation acquired the conference from its retiring founder Richard Saul Wurman. He gave an emotional talk at the 2002 TED conference regarding what inspired him to do so.
February 13, 2008
SpeakerPalooza, the National Speakers Association’s 
four-day Winter “Festival,” kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. Speakers include Chip Heath, co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Made to Stick; John Miller, author of the best-selling books QBQ! The Question Behind the Question and Flipping The Switch; Steve Spangler, a master at turning ordinary moments into unforgettable experiences. The conference will be at the San Francisco Airport Mariott.
Conference registration opens at 8 a.m. on Thursday, with workshops running throughout the day. Miller’s keynote will be at 6 p.m. Thursday. Chip Heath’s closing keynote will be Sunday at 10 a.m. For a full schedule, go to the NSA Web site.
I figured it would be challenging to 
maintain the attention of college students as a guest speaker the week after San Francisco State resumed classes after Spring Break. That’s when I was scheduled to talk to an Internet marketing class last year on the topic of search engine marketing.
If I had titled the speech, “Search Engine Marketing” and flashed that up on the first PowerPoint slide or had the professor introduce me along with that title, I imagined I would have lost the students to mobile phone games or text messaging.
Instead, I labeled the presentation: “Making Money on Google,” which captured their attention immediately. That’s because the title appealed to their self-interest. It suggested they were about to learn how they can make money on Google.
A speech title, like a news article’s headline, should be stripped to the core of the presentation’s essence. Since I knew all the students searched on Google, as opposed to its far smaller competitors Yahoo or MSN, it allowed me to keep the title short and punchy.
If you want the audience to listen, keep in mind, they want to know: what’s in it for me? How am I going to be able to use this information?
Tech Glitch in Presentation? Call on Robin Williams