Last week I gave a talk to the Canberra Society of Editors (CSE). The topic was social networking and blogging, so it seemed a great idea to blog directly from the meeting. I’d got myself organised with a half-written post, and had bookmarked all the sites I planned to talk about. Sadly, I was defeated by technology. For the first time ever, my computer refused to start (it then repaired itself, but too late for me to use it during my talk). Luckily, the organiser had supplied a laptop along with the data projector, so I was able to use that instead; however, that meant trying to remember my passwords for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, which was a challenge. In addition, the wireless connection kept dropping out, then taking me back to the laptop’s home page each time I reconnected. The many technological glitches confirmed my belief that it’s best to give or a talk or a training session with just a whiteboard and a marker! (Although obviously that wouldn’t have worked very well for a talk about social networking and blogging).
I was actually a last-minute stand in for another speaker, so my talk simply expanded on an article I’d written for the CSE’s March newsletter. I was pleased to be able to make use of all the thinking I’d done when drafting the article, and we had some good discussion afterwards about the usefulness of some of the sites (I realised that I’m probably not using Twitter effectively – someone in the audience mentioned that it’s a fantastic tool for gathering information).