Toastmaster’s competition, Cambridge (Speech 3)
How Toastmasters made me No 1 in the World
Mr Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guest….
How many Toastmasters can claim to be No 1 in the world as a result of signing up with this excellent organisation? That’s what has happened to me, and I’m going to tell you how.
I met a fellow Toastmaster at my first meeting here in February and we had a conversations that totally transformed my life. I met Geoff and he introduced me to blogging, to a world of widgets and wikis, of hyperlinks and RSS feeds, a totally new language which I am still becoming familiar with.
For those of you who don’t know what blogging is, it is an interactive diary that you publish on the web. You can share it with just family and friends if you wish, or you can use it like Geoff and myself, to seek-out other like minded people throughout the world and develop an online conversation by inviting them to post comments.
Geoff is a leading expert on this subject, he held the country’s first ever conference on blogging, in Cambridge last year. He suggested I give it a try, said it was dead easy, if you can book airline tickets online, then you can run a webblog, he said.
Within days I had set up a site and entered a whole new world known as blogsphere. At the last count there were 53.5 million blogs throughout the world. This figure rises dramatically every second of the day, there are a 75,000 new weblogs created daily. This numbers double every six months and it is now 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago.
So what is its appeal, you may wonder? Well for me, as a journalist, I find it is the perfect outlet for my creative energy, it is endlessly stimulating and totally absorbing.
I write about politics, current affairs and anything that interests me, from the shortage of male sperm donors and domestic violence, to the shortcomings of our political leaders, as well as my fear of public speaking. It records the miscellany of my life. I have a link for all my Toastmaster speeches, as well as my personal photographs too because blogging promotes who you really are as a person. I am also using it to promote my work and clients as the links to the web boosts our Google ranking quite considerably.
Another attraction is the interactive element. Bloggers from all over the world come to my site and post comments, from Bahrain and India, Sicily and Sidney, they respond to what I have written.
Bloggers often hide behind a veil of anonymity, they can have weird and wonderful names, like Raincoster and Vented Spleen, Daily Dog and Icedink. Some of my new friends in blogsphere include Dizzy, Croydonion, and the Injured Cyclist on the political front, as well as The Strumpette, Welshcakes Limoncello and Mr Chalk the teacher. I have no idea who they are in real life, they could be any of you sitting out there.
It can also lead to new introductions and amazing coincidences. When writing about Toastmasters earlier this year, I had a comment posted from a blogger who writes a site called Daily Propaganda in Switzerland who said there was a Toastmasters down the road from him in Lausanne which he was thinking of joining. It later transpired that not only were we born in the same town, but also the same hospital, and we never knew of each other up until then. I am now collaborating with him on a project regarding prisons in the UK. We may even meet up at the end of the month when he pays a visit to England.
Many news stories in today’s papers have been broken by bloggers, including ones I have written. Two top Tory sites often promote my work. Last weekend a guide of political bloggers was published and I was ranked the top Tory woman blogger in the country, I am ranked 38th out of 400 people who write about political issues in the UK. My blog has been recommended on Channel 4 podcasts and in the Guardian newspaper.
I have contributed towards a book compiled by political bloggers which was a sell out. I was even invited to audition for a new Channel 4 treasure hunt programme which would have taken me to archaeological sites around the world. That’s how blogging has raised my profile in just six months.
I am very proud of my site. I hope you will all stop and visit my site. My domain name is elleeseymour.com, but you can just type Ellee in the search engine and Google will find me straight away because I am listed at No 1 in the world – that’s what Toastmasters has done for me.
19th September 2006
