Adii Rockstar

So following up on this tweet about my upcoming international travels, I have to say that there’s only two words to describe my current emotion: surreal & blessed.

At the beginning of the year I set myself the goal of speaking at, at least 3 international conferences. Up until now I’ve spoken at:

• DIBI, Newcastle
• NetProphet, Cape Town (local, but international in quality & size)
• EECI2010, San Francisco

I will however soon add the following conferences to this list:

• SchnitzelConf, Vienna (September 2010)
• WordCampNL, Utrecht (November 2010)
• TBA, Las Vegas (December 2010)

Couple that with the fact that I’ll also be visiting Corfu (Greece), London, Barcelona, Madrid & Lisbon on honeymoon with Jeanne in October and you’ve got yourself a jet setting line-up there.

So I’m being paid to see some amazing cities across the globe and I’ve far exceeded my goal of 3 international conferences, which really is a surreal experience (considering that there are awesome people that want to pay me to hear me speaking). Consider this as a thanks to all of you that have in any way made this possible! :)

I’ve been watching the video of my recent presentation at NetProphet, in an attempt of improving my speaking skills going forward. So whilst there’s quite a few things that I will be looking to tweak going forward, I wanted to confirm one thing from the talk: the Adii on that video, is 100% me.

The way I think, talk & interact in that presentation is the same idea you’re gonna get when you meet me in person. I do this to make my presentations as conversational as possible.

This approach most definitely isn’t perfect, but it’s me.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve spoken at some local & international conferences and have EECI2010 in San Francisco coming up in a few days time.

Now I don’t consider myself to be a professional speaker and as a result I don’t need to get paid to speak at amazing events; instead I’m just honoured that there’s an audience willing to listen to what I have to say. But everyone has water & lights to pay for and as a result I do need my expenses covered to enable me to speak at these conferences.

So I’ve decided to take a bit of a hard line on asking for my costs to be covered when I’m asked to speak at a conference. I don’t do this to be a little diva, but speaking at a conference shouldn’t cost me anything other than the “working time” that I sacrifice to be there.

What do you think? Does this make me a little bitch?