Scott Berkun's Blog, page 103

Why conferences must talk about failure

The web failed to let me know about this one before it happened, but last week The first ever FAILCON event took place, where 400 people met to talk about and learn from failure (hat tip: Lynn). The only other thing like it I can think of is failcamp, which didn't get the buzz it deserved.

From the nice writeup on Wired, it appears the event went well and hopefully there will be more events like this, or perhaps even other well known events will adopt a "Learning from failure" track. If you...

Elliason does it again (amazing art)

One of my favorite living artists, Elliason, has a new project open in Copenhagen (He's the guy who did the waterfall project in NYC, which I saw and wrote about).

I saw his weather project at the Tate museum in London years ago and it blew my mind. See this video:

Research help: A web challenge!

Hi guys. I'm working on a keynote for next week's Web 2.0 Expo conference in NYC, at the Jacob Javits center.

It turns out I was at Internet World in '97, at the same venue, trying to get people to upgrade to IE 4.0.  Wow, I feel old.

The funny thing is i can't find a single bit of useful information about what happened at Internet World Fall, '97 in NYC. No agendas. No speaker lists. No nothing.

In 20 minutes of research, I found almost nothing useful on the web about a premier event about...

Wednesday linkfest

Here are this week's links:

Behind the scenes at Pixar – it's not all fun and games.  Intensity works both ways.What to do when they mix up your talk - Great story of things going wrong at a tech conference – they posted the wrong title and description, so to the audience, she was giving the wrong talk.Slow news movement? – From the article it seems Gilmour hasn't read Amusing ourselves to death, which argued for a kind of slow news, or at least news as divorced from entertainment centric...

Stephen Colbert fights the closeminded

I don't watch either that often, but while I do prefer the Daily show to Colbert, the later is a fascinating show both for it's absurd level of satire, but also its deconstruction of punditry. In this recent interview in Rolling Stone magazine, I found this point particularly interesting:

Rolling Stone: A lot of people view what you do as liberal vs. conservative. But what you're saying is that the show is really about people who are flexible in their beliefs vs. people who are fixed in their...

Confessions now shipping from Amazon.com

In a nice surprise, the book is in stock at amazon as of tonight – didn't expect this for another few days. You can get the book right now! Yay!

If you've already read the book on safari or preview, you can head over now and be the first to put in a review.

First review of Confessions is in

Mike Riley at Dobb's Journal posted the first review I've seen of Confessions on a blog. Here's an excerpt:

Scott's recollections and revelations are highly accurate and frequently entertaining.

In summary, Confessions of a Public Speaker is a book for anyone faced with presenting an important message to an audience.  This is a book that will be referenced frequently, often before giving a pubic speech or presenting at important social function.  Practicing the book's tips will almost...

Photos from last night's talk

Things went well at Refresh Boston last night. Good sized crowd (I'm told it was their biggest ever), great questions and lots of interest in the book. Thanks to everyone who came, tweeted, blogged and flickrered – it all helps get the word out about Confessions of a Public Speaker.

Here's a photo from Sean of me mid-talk:

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And another from Patrick, with a "don't do this" slide:

Next stop: Olin College.

Boston Book Tour Report: Days 1 & 2

5 lectures down, 3 more to go.

The week started with my featured talk at UI14, where I got to present from the new book about presenting and pitching (You can see some amazing sketch notes of my talk from Jason Robb).   Presenting about presenting is almost as tricky as presenting about writing about presenting  (or blogging about presenting about writing about blogging). After staying up much to late with other speakers, I taught a day session on Managing Innovation. The UIE folks know how...

Do you listen to audiobooks? Advice wanted

I'm in talks now with O'Reilly Media about producing an audiobook for Confessions of a Public Speaker. I've never done one of these things before, and the few I've heard were mixed bags.

Here are some questions:

Do you prefer to have the author do the reading?
What factors make one audiobook better than another (besides the quality of the book itself)?
Is it important that the audiobook is identical to the printed version?
What are the top annoyances you wish audiobooks would avoid?

For...