Public speaking

I’ve been told I’m not too bad at public speaking.  I’ll admit, giving a presentation isn’t something I could do at the drop of a hat and I do get incredibly nervous beforehand, but it is something that I seem to have a bit of a knack at.  I’ve got a 10 minute presentation to do in a couple of works for the BNI chapter I’m a member of (more on all that later) and it’s something I’m looking forward to do and I’d love longer to talk about the work that I do and why I do it.

However, if you want to see the best public speakers (and here’s the reason for the post), you wouldn’t be going far wrong to go and see any speech given by a member of Microsoft Research.  Some people rate Apple’s Steve Jobs as a good speaker.  He is good, he has a passion for what he does and, provided there’s not too much pressure (see his not so great talks when Bill Gates is also in attendance) he does a very good job – the apple fans a-whooping and a-holloring at ever word he says are about as welcome as the “IN THE HOLE” arses at major golfing events though.

However, when it comes to passion for what they do, and being able to make sense of even the most complex ideas, the MS Research guys seem to be in a league of their own.

Watch the first 45 minutes of this speech given by Bill Buxton at the UK Mix 08 event.  He’s going to go into a lot of depth about design and why it’s important and what it all means.  I watched it, I was enjoying it and about halfway through something clicked and has meant me completely changing the way I’ll go about website design in the future and how my business in general will work.

Once Buxton finishes, Scott Guthrie takes over.  He’s a very passionate man about the work he does (basically everything to do with development software at Microsoft) but he’s just not quite as good when it comes to getting those ideas across.

Enjoy!