Notist Blog

Whether you are a new or established speaker, there are only a very few people who are lucky enough to have conferences coming to them directly. Building your profile can help organisers find you, however for most of us who speak, actively finding events and applying to them is part of the job. In this article I’ll share some tips for finding and applying to events and conferences.

For the last few weeks, Notist has been open for beta testing. Thanks to great feedback from all corners of the globe, we’ve made some solid improvements, trapped some bugs, and built up a solid list of features we’d all like to see added. We hope it’s been as much fun for you as it has been for us.

At a recent conference, a friend shared that she was anxious about getting up on stage because she’d counted three people in the audience that had already seen her give the same presentation at a different event. It’s a very common worry, and one we’ve written about before. I was thinking about this when I came across this really great TED Talk by Simone Giertz.

A common worry for presenters is what happens if you overrun, or come in too short? While this is something that does tend to improve with time, even the most experienced presenter can occasionally find themselves sending everyone for an early coffee or racing through the last section of a talk. In this post I share some suggestions for accurately timing your talks.

Over the last few days we have started to work our way through the queue of signups for Notist, a few at a time. If you reserved your username, you should at some point in the next week or so receive an email to let you know when your account is ready to use.

Many of us who are regulars on the conference circuit have been using Storify to collect lists of tweets and other social feedback from our events, but it is closing down on May 16th.

Over the last day or so I’ve started to add a bunch of my presentations into the Beta version of Notist. I’m Beta Tester Number 1 and excited to share with you a sneak preview of how things are shaping up.

New presenters often feel that they need to write a brand-new talk for each conference they are invited to. Unless your job is giving presentations, or you are being paid very well for each talk you give, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep this up if you do more than a couple of talks per year. In this article Rachel shares some tips for reusing material and creating talks of different lengths.

We really loved Lanyrd as a site for logging the events and conferences we were attending and speaking it. As a conference speaker, much of the content you’ve spent time curating in Lanyrd has crossover with the sort of thing you’d want to store in Notist. As it’s no longer possible to log in to Lanyrd, we’ve fast-tracked a tool to help you grab your data.

I’m often asked how I put together my talks. How do I get past the blank page and make a start on a deck that might contain well over 100 individual slides? I usually start by asking myself a few questions. The main one being - what do I hope the audience will learn? Following on from that I consider which examples will best demonstrate that point.