On Saturday I crossed a major milestone in my career: I delivered my first work-related seminar.

For a little while I had been going to conferences and seminars to learn more for my career, and it slowly started to hit me… this question of “how do I get to the level where I can start speaking at conferences?” I have always enjoyed public speaking and thought it would further my own skills if I started sharing at conferences. So I set a job goal with my boss: within the year I will become a conference presenter.

This weekend I achieved my goal at the PodCamp London unconference. I took what I’ve learned through my job as web producer at St. Joseph’s Health Care, London about building content for the Web and produced a talk:

“Writing for the Web - plain and simple”

watch the “Writing for the Web - plain and simple” slideshow
(Quicktime… press space bar to watch the slide transitions)

or view the slideshow without the nifty transitions:
(save/print this presentation)

I was amazed to see the level of interest around a presentation about web writing best practices. I booked a room for my talk for 40 people since I didn’t figure I’d generate a huge turnout compared to the other awesome presenters at PodCamp. Much to my surprise, I had a standing-room crowd spilling out into the hall.

I hope that the audience gained something from my talk, and will use some of this knowledge to enhance their online writing. Writing online is a lot different than writing for print… mainly because of the way humans look at screens. Short, simple sentences that capture the viewer’s attention are challenging to compose; but lead to successful web sites.

I certainly gained a lot from my experience presenting. I also gained a lot of inspiration from PodCamp - a gathering of truly intelligent people with great ideas and a willingness to share. Jeff Sage wrote a great post about why the unconference model of PodCamp was so innovative.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on writing for the web, PodCamp, or any feedback on my talk.