My father, who’s done his fair share of public speaking over the course of his career as a manager, wrote up the 10 points I’ve detailed below. I thought these points were great and wanted to share them. So here you go:

Tip #1: Remember that no one in the audience knows as much as you do about the topic. You are the expert.

Tip #2: The audience is interested in what you have to say. Slow down and take the time to think between the points you want to emphasize. This will demonstrate your confidence and the depth of your knowledge of the subject.

Tip #3: Practice, practice, practice.

At the venue before your presentation:

Tip #4: Check out the room. Walk up to the podium and simulate the presentation in your mind before you have to give it. This can be done the night before, during a lunch break, or during the natural break prior to your presentation. (Note: The more time you have between this and the actual presentation, the better.)

Tip #5: Meet the technical people. Make sure that they know what your material consists of (PowerPoint, videos or audio). Be prepared for an IT meltdown – have some hard copies of your presentation to handout if the IT fails. Above all, don’t apologize for a failure in the technology – have a backup plan. In my opinion, this is the most common failure in presentations: not having a plan.

During your presentation:

Tip #6: Make eye contact. Look for the friendly faces of people that you know or have spoken to. This will help you use spontaneous examples to support your presentation. And remember – stay on track! Keep the examples brief, but connect with those in the audience that you know are supportive of you personally and what you are presenting. This will connect you with the majority of the audience.

Tip #7: Relax. All of the tension has occurred 2 or 3 days before the presentation. You know the material, you have done the planning, and you have friends and supporters in the audience. You have an important message for them and they want to hear it.

Tip #8: If questions arise, be polite and answer them, but don’t let questions throw you off your presentation plan. Let the questions flow, but there will be a natural break when you can bring the presentation back to your control. Audience interest and discussion is a very positive thing, but ensure that you regain control and finish your material.

Tip #9: If you don’t know the answer – be honest! “I don’t have all of the information on the point you’re making, but I will make some inquiries and get back to you with an appropriate answer.”

At the conclusion of your presentation:

Tip #10: Thank the audience for their attention and interest. If there are outstanding issues or unanswered questions, pledge to do the follow up. This is normally a time when questions are asked. When they are finished, reiterate what a pleasure it has been to present the important information to the audience.

Microsoft has desperately needed to reinvent themselves in the mobile marketplace, and it looks like this may be exactly the sort of dramatic change they needed (and hopefully indicates the direction they’re heading in).

While I’m not crazy about the inability to install apps not sanctioned by Microsoft inside their Marketplace, the visual appeal and improved user experience of this new OS may still be enough to win some folks back to the Microsoft mobile platform.

Here’s a video from Engadget showcasing the Windows Phone 7 Series and some of its features.

I’ve always found the transformational nature (data turns into information, which turns into knowledge, which turns into wisdom) as well as the lack of  focus on context (‘wisdom’ — whatever wisdom is — is not always necessarily better to have than data) a bit annoying. But read Patrick’s post, it’s very informative and makes some great points.

With any system, there is the inevitable volume question — how do we derive the quality information from the mediocre but high-quantity information. As Jack correctly points out, using collaboration tools (think Twitter, FaceBook, etc.) can actually make it more difficult to track that conversation down later on, whereas an email conversation (thread, basically) might be easier to search through.

In addition to Jack’s points, I can also envision situations where client confidentiality or other sensitivities would prevent you from having this sort of public conversation — where you would want the flow of any conversation to be tightly controlled and monitored (counter-intuitive to collaboration, I know, but unfortunately, sometimes a regulatory or legal reality).

I’ve always believed that most of the time, frustrations arise due to people picking the wrong method of communication for a particular conversation. There is nothing inherently good or bad about email, we just sometimes need to give a bit more thought as to whether it’s the appropriate mode of communication for what we need to talk about.

Exactly the same thing I was.

It was then that I had a sudden realization about productivity: while technology may enhance our productivity when compared to how productive we used to be without (or with a ‘lesser’) technology, I seldom think about how little my productivity actually increases compared to others.

In the 1950s, Pancho Gonzales was one of the best tennis players in the world, and was known to have a particularly fast serve. At a 1951 tournament, officials decided to measure the players’ serves to see whose was the fastest — and Pancho Gonzales beat everybody with a speed of about 214 km/h.

Gonzales’ serve is certainly much faster than mine will ever be. But consider that Andy Roddick, the player who currently has the fastest serve in tennis, has the recorded fastest serve with a speed of 249.5 km/h. Tennis serves have gotten faster in the past 60 years.

Much like there’s more to productivity than technology, there’s more to being a great tennis player than just having a fast serve. But having a faster serve certainly doesn’t hurt.

But let’s go back to Pancho Gonzales for a second. If we could enter Gonzales into a present-day tennis tournament, his once-astounding 214 km/h serve wouldn’t be that far above the average speed of the first serve — around 185 km/h.

So as individual players have gotten faster, other players have had to get faster too, or else face getting left behind by their colleagues. But the speed of your serve is only one aspect of tennis, and as other players get better at hitting returns or improve the accuracy of their serves, that individual player has to get better at all those elements as well.

This kind of evolutionary arms race is similar to the Red Queen effect:

“For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with.”

And in terms of technology, we really are evolving one technology within a broader, complex web of other technologies, where continued evolution is necessary just to stay afloat within that broader system.

So while I may be able to read and respond to email while sitting in that train, if everybody else has the same ability, then I’m not really much ahead of where I was before. And if there were some new device that allowed you to send email while the subway was underground, would I be falling behind if I couldn’t do that as well (and yes, the amount of email you send is probably the worst measure of productivity )?

I’ll try to remember to bring a magazine next time I take the subway.

The video has to be your own work and publicly available for people to watch, but other than that, there’s not really many rules as far as content or subject matter go. So if you’ve got something to say about knowledge management, or are just super-talented at making viral videos, why not submit something?

Patrick’s also giving away some prizes: KM Method Cards, KM Approaches, Methods and Tools – A Guidebook, and his Organisation Culture Cards (worth US$140).

I know that 2009 was a rough year for many, but let’s hope things continue to pick up in 2010. Hopefully you all got to spend some time with friend and family before the end of the calendar year (and some rest as well!). All the best in the upcoming year.

The Wired wiki (yes, there’s a Wired wiki) has an entry to help you un-FaceBook yourself — or if you’re not willing (or able) to break your FaceBook addiction, you can at least fiddle with the site’s privacy settings to allow yourself to get some sleep at night without worrying who’s looking at the skeletons in your FaceBook closet.

As I’ve said before, I’m pretty terrible at responding to anything on FaceBook — but I’ve been trying to get better. But I wonder, if I’m not able to keep up with FaceBook, how will I ever be able to keep up with Twitter? I thought that getting Twitter on my mobile might get me using it more, but so far it’s a no-go.

While there have been a few mixed reviews about the phone, I’m fairly confident that the robust hardware (a 1GHz processor and 448 MB of RAM) would be enough to keep me happy for a while (I seem to only be able to keep a phone for just under a year these days).

I’ve had a good run with the Diamond, and can’t really say that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with it (besides a few peeling edges on the casing, which probably has more to do with my rough handling of the phone than anything else). As usual, I’m just interested in having the latest and greatest… but I’m really debating whether I pick up this device or wait for Windows Mobile 7 (supposedly coming out sometime soon in 2010). I don’t imagine that HTC or Microsoft is going to provide any ROM-update ability to Windows Mobile 7.

If you’re interested in reading a review of the HD2, GSMArena’s got a pretty good summary of the pros and cons of the phone, as well as a good outline (as usual) of the features and specs of the HD2.

And just for the record, I’d still rather have one of these than the Nexus One. EDIT: If you’re already dying to get your hands on the ‘Google Phone’, first make sure you know what you’re getting. PC World’s got a bit of a different take on why the ‘Google Phone’ may not be everything the world had hoped for.

Not many surprises there really, but apparently I use the word ‘things’ a lot. Who knew. Click on the image below for a bigger version.