Maybe it was the quad-shot non-fat mocha? The hot lights? The megascreen? The ‘reverse’ auditorium’? Maybe all of the above – but I was nervous when I quickly spread through my presentation today at BlogIN. In fact, my heart was pounding pretty good before I got up to speak. That’s unusual for me. As soon as I started sweating from the lights, though, I noticed my voice shaking. Ugh.
Weird – because it was a comparably small audience with many folks that have previously seen me speak. I definitely felt a great connection to the audience, but was still nervous. Perhaps I’ve had a such a great string of events that it was time that I got stirred up a little.
Correction to my presentation – I said 160 characters for micro-blogging, it’s 140. Doh! 160 is SMS.
Public speaking isn’t always easy but I really appreciate any opportunity to speak. Perhaps the key issue on this one was the venue. I don’t think I’ve actually done a presentation with such a huge screen and the audience ABOVE me rather than below. I’ve read a lot that a practice walk-through at your venue is always a good method of easing your nerves. I think that may have helped a lot today.
After we cut from the Auditorium and moved to the sessions in IUPUI’s classrooms (that were INCREDIBLY equipped!), all was good. I can’t explain what a feeling it is to see someone’s confused face and eventually turn that into a ‘Oh!’ and see the lights turn on. That’s what I LOVE about doing these events. This technology is NOT easy for most people – and I really appreciate every chance I get to help someone through it!
Redirect Advice for WordPress, converting to Permalinks
I may have given one piece of bum advice to Lorraine Ball. Ken Zweigal (who is a master with SEO) gave me an odd look and may have identified my mistake. Thankfully for me, he didn’t rip me. 
Lorraine was converting her blog from normal querystring links to permalinks (where you see actual keywords and phrases in the URL for each post rather than a ?p=1234). Permalinks with Post Slugs can make quite a difference in the Search Engine ranking of your content.
I said that Lorraine HAD to put some redirects for each of her posts in her .htaccess file. It’s actually not a requirement to do that – WordPress will still find and display the appropriate article. However, it is good to still use the redirect to notify the Search Engine that the link to the article is now the new permalink.
Maybe next time I’ll cut the caffeine before the event and get used to the heat of the lights.
