Comments on: Failing With Toastmasters

By: Chuck McKinnon

Chuck McKinnon — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 19:00:05 +0000

Hi Steve, If you don't already read it, I recommend Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog for her insights into how to engage the brain for an optimal learning experience. Her topics are often about software or books, but the underlying ideas should translate well to professional speaking.

By: jethro

jethro — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 21:39:26 +0000

Steve, I too would appreciate a full text feed. For some reason, my office “content filter” doesn’t allow me to visit your actual blog, so when I’m away from home, I need to make do with the Bloglines feed.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 20:28:05 +0000

I have to agree with the pro-full text advocates above. I love the site, but I’d unsubscribe from a summary feed. I’m guessing one motive might be to increase traffic to the advertising, which makes sense to me. If so, how about offering a full-text feed that has ads unobtrusively located within the full content? Seems like the best trade-off to me.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 16:08:19 +0000

Steve – I enjoy your site very much and recommend it to my friends. I monitor it daily via a RSS feed. It will pain me but I will unsubscribe from any feed that is not full text. Its just too annoying for a snippet to drop off mid-sentance. I understand you’re probably doing this to drive traffic to your site. However, I think this will backfire as people like me will unsubscribe and forget to check the site.

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 15:06:56 +0000

Steve, I would suggest you stay with summary feeds. If I remember correctly, you use the website traffic data as a yardstick for your progress. Some services, such as Bloglines, may distort the numbers by caching the same feed for many people. By requiring people to actually visit the site you get a more accurate count.

By: Adrian Trenholm

Adrian Trenholm — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 07:58:08 +0000

It’s great to see a bit of blog buzz building up around Toastmasters – maybe it will become the next GTD? I agree completely with the idea of using the Toastmasters club as a testbed for new ideas and approaches, and I agree with Ted too, a lot of the magic is in Evaluation.

The mission of every Toastmasters club is the same, and it bears repeating here:

The mission of a Toastmasters Club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth.

Quick plug for our club: if you live or work near Liverpool Street Station in London, the nearest TM club is City of London Toastmasters.

http://www.cityspeakers.co.uk

PS Bandwidth notwithstanding, I vote for full feeds too. If you cannot stretch to that , I prefer to see a summary of the post in my feed reader, rather than the first few words, arbitrarily cut off with …

By: Accel Banks

Accel Banks — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 07:24:00 +0000

> Because I tend to write some fairly long posts, the full
> text feeds are beginning to chew up significant bandwidth,
> and I want to see if bandwidth requirements will be
> reduced with summary feeds.

I am not sure I get the point of this experiment.

The way I see it, going from a full-text feed to a first-para-only feed could either increase the bandwidth, because people would both get the first-para via RSS, click on it and get the full-text via the website, or it could decrease the bandwidth, because people would get the first-para via RSS, refuse to click on it and not read the article. In the first case, going to a first-para-only feed is a bad idea because it increases traffic and irritates people accessing the blog via an RSS reader. In the second case, going to a first-para-only feed is a bad idea because it reduces the number of people who read the articles.

Am I missing something?

By: Ted

Ted — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 01:26:42 +0000

Although some people do very well upon completion of the CTM, I have found many people make almost as much growth attaining their ATMB. There are also other positions that require much growth – Toastmaster and Evaluator come to mind. I find it a challenge to be the Toastmaster of the evening in that I want to make the program seem fresh and not pendantic.

I find the real challenge is in giving good evaluations. As an evaluator I am constantly tring to figure out how I can best help the member grow in their speaking skills.

On thing we do that I think helps guests is we have name tags for everyone. Since my experience is people will forget them, we print out name tags (first name only) for evryone at each meeting. I use 2″ x 4″ shipping labels. It only take a minute to print out name tags for everyone and the cost is minimal. I feel it really makes guests feel more at home as they don’t have to try to remember everyone’s name. For guests we fill out a manual name tag for them.

By: Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:06:25 +0000

I opted to test summary feeds for about a week to see what effect it has on bandwidth. Because I tend to write some fairly long posts, the full text feeds are beginning to chew up significant bandwidth, and I want to see if bandwidth requirements will be reduced with summary feeds.

By: Peter Knowles

Peter Knowles — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 19:28:27 +0000

Please can you restore the full-text RSS feed? Please!!!