Before You Open Your Mouth: The Keys to Great Public Speaking, Nick Morgan

Why is most public speaking so awful? You know what I’m talking about because you’ve been there, sitting in a meeting room with 50 other hapless colleagues—or 375 other disheartened conference-goers—and listened with increasing desperation as the speaker droned on, reading from Power Point slides so detailed that you couldn’t make out the words, talking about a subject so filled with jargon and clichés that the topic got less and less clear as time went on... and on... and on. It’s a near-death experience. Why is most public speaking so awful? Why do we subject our fellow human beings to this form of torture when there are so many better things we could all be doing, like cutting our toenails, baking snickerdoodles, or watching re-runs of The Prisoner?

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Who’s Got Your Back: Why You Need the “Lifeline Relationships” that Create Success and Won’t Let You Fail, Keith Ferrazzi

Lifeline Relationships Behind every great leader, at the base of every great tale of success, you will find an indispensable circle of trusted advisors, mentors, and colleagues. These groups come in all forms and sizes and can be found at every level and in nearly all spheres of both professional and personal life, but what they all have in common is a unique kind of connection with each other that I’ve come to call lifeline relationships. These relationships are, quite literally, why some people succeed far more than others. There’s a good chance that you’ve already experienced the power and potential of lifeline relationships at some point in your life. Imagine some of the attributes of the best bosses you’ve ever had— the kind of boss who encourages you, who gives you space to grow, who appreciates your efforts, who doesn’t micromanage but guides your development with wisdom, and who handles your slip-ups with firmness, understanding, and candor. Or think back to that good friend or family member who dropped everything to be there for you at a critical juncture in your life and didn’t let you fail. Picture that associate you had at work who took a risk for you, and whose influence still touches you today. If you’ve ever had an important person or group of people in your life who’ve shepherded you in the right direction—even if you’ve had just a taste of it—you know what I mean.

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Internet has only just begun, say founders

April 22nd, 2009 by Daniel Silva

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British software genius Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the World Wide Web system gives a speech during the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009) in Madrid. While the Internet has dramatically changed lives around the world, its full impact will only be realised when far more people and information go on-line, its founders said.

While the Internet has dramatically changed lives around the world, its full impact will only be realised when far more people and information go on-line, its founders said Wednesday.

"The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past," said Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, at a seminar on its future.

Just 23 percent of the globe's population currently uses the Internet, according to the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union, with use much higher in developed nations.

By contrast, just five percent of Africans surf the web, it said in a report issued last month.

But that level is expected to rise, especially in developing nations, as mobile Internet access takes off, making it no longer necessary to use a computer to surf the Web, said Internet co-founder Vinton Cerf.

"We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet," the Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist said.

Robert Cailliau, who designed the Web with Berners-Lee in 1989, said having more data on the Internet, and more people with the ability to access it, will spur the development of new technology and solutions to global problems.

"When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces," the Belgian software scientist said.

The Internet has already led to the development of businesses that could not have existed without it, boosted literacy and learning and brought people closer together through cheaper modes of communication, the Internet pioneers said.

"We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily," said Cerf.

With the help of other scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Berners-Lee and Cailliau set up the Web in 1989 to allow thousands of scientists around the world to share information and data.

The WWW technology -- which simplifies the process of searching for information on the Internet -- was first made more widely available from 1991.

The number of Web sites has since ballooned from just 500 as recently as 1994 to over 80 million currently, with growing numbers of sites consisting of user-generated content like blogs.

Even its founders are surprised by its popularity.

"What we did not imagine was a Web of people, but a Web of documents," said Dale Dougherty, the founder of GNN, the Global Network Navigator, the first web portal and the first site on the Internet to be supported by advertising.

For his part, Cailliau said he was impressed that search engines can still sort through the myriad of material that is now on-line.

"To me the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites," said Cailliau.

Source: Physorg.com

Need a Coach? Try an Avatar

Looking for a coach? Planning a meeting across time-zones? Hosting a conference, running a workshop or training employees? If so, an avatar may be at your service. In the not-so-distant future, virtual worlds may be the go-to technology for getting work done.

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Twitter with your brain

"GO BADGERS" isn't an unusual message to get from the University of Wisconsin at Madison - particularly when it's a status update from Twitter, the texting service that limits users to 140 characters at a time. The unusual thing about this message is how it got to Twitter in the first place:via brain waves. University of Wisconsin doctoral student Adam Wilson's cheer for the hometown team is among the first direct brain-to-Twitter messages ever sent - and it points the way to better communication systems for paralyzed patients who have to cope with the conditions faced by physicist Stephen Hawking and the late Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

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