Please explain Business Speakers to a Martian

They come, they talk, they hand out books/CDs/notes, they get paid, they go.

I guess many have day jobs - CEO, media consultants etc and it's good PR to stand in front of people and give a good talk.

I don't really see the point from the audience point of view - except for entertainment, or maybe hoping for a bit of "touching the hem" effect, hoping that some of the magic will rub off.

But maybe I'm a Martian. I have seen quite a few business speakers in action, I've done a bit of business speaking myself.

What do you get out of going to see a business speaker, apart from the networking opporunity?
What specific changes in your life/business do you attribute to seeing a particular business speaker?

Facebook, the Ring That Binds Them All

In the past couple of weeks I've signed up to two service that I really like. One is LastPass, which generates and manages passwords. it's a paying service that took over the almost defunct Foxmarks/Xmarks. I'm happy to pay them and I hope to see them do well. I'll stick with them as long as the service works, and as long as they don't start trying to manage other parts of my digital activities.

The other service is DropBox. I had used it as an FTP share service before, but then the other day I saw Don MacAskill raving about it on Twitter. So I responded asking what's so great about it and he said try it and you'll see. So I did, was raving within half an hour so my office mate checked it out and got it too. It's a free service up to 2GB and then $9.99 for up to 50GB. I'm happy to entrust lots of fairly confidential files to them and pay for the service, again as long as they don't start trying to manage other parts of my digital activities.

I knew that if Don MacAskill was raving about it, it would be good. Don is co-founder and co-owner of SmugMug, a paying photo share site that's been profitable since it started over 10 years ago. I've seen how the site operates, I've seen Don interviewed by Scoble, I've interacted with him on Twitter and all in all he's the digital entrepreneur I admire and trust most in the whole world. Unlike Flickr he hasn't sold out to the creep Yahoo! that's also trying to play the own-its-subscribers game.

I don't know Mark Zuckerberg and I never will, but what I see of him rings alarm bells. The thing he has created risks being like The Ring in the Tolkein books - so powerful that it attracts the corrupt and corrupts those who are attracted to it at a corporate/investor level.

One of the big risks of our modern world is putting all our eggs into one basket - one economic model, one global financial system, one strain of corn, one family of antibiotics.

Long live diversity. Long live digital entrepreneurs with passion and integrity who are dedicated to creating an outstanding service and have no ambition to take over the world.

Soundbite Traps #1 - Less is NOT more

If you had a dollar or a euro or a pound or maybe a yuan for every time you've read or heard "less is more" you could probably go out and buy an iPad, or maybe donate some money to a good cause, right?

There are a few instances where less of one thing equates to more of another.  For example, if you're overweight then less weight is likely to equate to more years of life.  For people with cashflow problems, less cash probably equates to more worries.

HOWEVER, in the way that this phrase is normally used, Less is NOT more.  Less might be better, but it's not MORE.  "Less is better" has a nice asonance as well.

"Less is more"sounds smart but it's actually a "1984" lie.