public speaking

Today marks the start of Pubcon 2012, and I’ll be functioning in the roles of speaker, panelist, panel moderator, and audience member. Thanks to Eric Bergman’s 5 Steps to Conquer “Death by PowerPoint,” I’ll be observing a metric I’ve never paid attention to before: each speaker’s Q-ratio.

Conference-goers know that at any given meeting, they will be subjected to a range of presentations – some interesting, others, well, not so interesting. Conference organizers don’t like to offer a podium to inept or boring presenters, of course – bad performances will drive away the paying customers. The approach conference organizers usually employ is to poll the audience about each presentation, asking about the content, the quality of the presentation, and so on. This is done after the fact, but at least low-scoring presenters can be crossed off the list for the next conference. Of course, this constant polling (often by paper questionnaires) is tedious and annoying for the conference attendees.

Last week, I gave a talk at Web2.0 Expo. From my perspective, I did a dreadful job at delivering my message. Yet, the context around my talk sparked a broad conversation about the implications of turning the backchannel into part of the frontchannel. In the last week, I've seen all sorts of blog posts and tweets and news articles about what went down. At this point, the sting has worn off and I feel that it would be responsible to offer my own perspective of what happened.