Ever since I started writing The Social Beat for Forbes, I’ve been wondering what to do with this, my beloved home blog. I have an idea. I currently crowd source my column ideas on Twitter and Facebook to get content, quotes and ideas that often find their way into the my columns.

But people send me lots of content that just doesn’t fit. It is not their fault. My descriptions are space limited at Forbes and my requests are often too open ended.  So I thought I would try expanding descriptions here. We’ll see how this works out.

Right now, I’m writing a story about Google+. My perspective is that Google+ could shape the future of Google, and that the company is in danger of being unimportant. I had hoped to have a Google spokesperson tell me why this is wrong, but after more than a month of requesting an interview, I’ve given up on having a conversation with anyone authorize to discuss it.

Here are my questions:

Have you used Google Plus? What was your experience?

Have you increased or decreased you use of it?

What do you think of their integration of Google+ with all other Google products? Is it anticompetitive? Does it make Google’s culture more social? Does it matter to you?

Do you have an anecdote about something that happened on Google+ that could not have happened on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Skype?

Additional Comments?

Please email me your answers. It is far easier for me that way than in a tweeted response.

I launched my new book, Stellar Presentations: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks six weeks ago. It is the most critically acclaimed of my three books. On Amazon, 10 people have given it five stars, two people gave it four stars and no one has rated it lower. Other blog reviews have also been highly favorable.

People who read it say the book is not just for entrepreneurs but for anyone who has to present in any kind or size of organization. I’ll let the market decide.

Some people think that because the book is so brief–just 76 pages, a two-hour read–that the price is high. I disagree, the value is in how the book can help you present, not the time it takes you to read it. But once again, I’ll let the market decide.

So for the month of April, I am offering  Stellar Presentations at significantly reduced price. You can now buy the paper version for $5.99 at Amazon and the Kindle version for just $4.99. This offer will expire at midnight April 30.

As my mother would say, “this is such a deal, as you wouldn’t believe.”

I am writing a column for Forbes.com called The Social Beat. Everything I write related to Social media, the web, startups and the tech sector will appear there. It will be the primary venue for my online writing. Please come and visit me there.

Occasionally, I will have something to say on other topics, particularly related to my book and speaking projects. I will use Global Neighbourhoods when that occurs.

Until then, I hope you will come and visit me in my new home.

The following is excerpted from Chapter One of my new book: Stellar Presentations: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks.

The Three Questions

I was raised as the youngest son in a Jewish family.  That meant that each Passover I recited the ritual Four Questions that launched the story-telling part of our Passover dinner. These days, I am rarely the youngest one at the table. But as a speaker and a coach, I begin the story that my clients or I will tell by reciting three questions:

1. Who are the people in the audience?
2. What do I have that they want?
3. What do I want to accomplish by addressing them?

I ask the first two of these questions to conference producers. When they invite me. The third is mine to answer before I accept an invite. Then, as happened in India, I replay the questions and the answers I received just before I start my talk.

Whatever your goal, you will come closer to achieving it if you understand who is listening to you and what you have that will interest them in some way related to their business.

I just told you how great Steve Jobs, was as a presenter, but, like most speakers, he had his off days. In one such case, it was clearly because he didn’t understand what his audience wanted from him.

In 1997, shortly after taking the reigns of Apple for the second time, Jobs was presiding over a press conference, whose objective I do not recall. What was memorable, however, is that he was acting defensively and was evasive in answering direct questions. This made the reporters in the room increasingly aggressive.

Finally, he snapped. “I know you guys are out to get me, just like you were the last time.” The room went quiet for a long moment.

Finally, Greg Zachary of the Wall Street Journal broke the awkward silence.  “Steve, you have us all wrong,” he said. “We don’t care whether you win or lose. We just want a good story—and we get it either way.”

People who attend a presentation are not there to serve the speaker’s goals.  They are there for their own business goals. Conversely, speakers are there to fulfill audience expectations.

Reporters want a good story.  The recent college grads in your audience are looking for a good place to work. Consultants are looking for some new business to pitch, and so on down the line.

A presentation usually starts with the audience generally on the speaker’s side. Other than hard-boiled reporters, most people will benefit far more if you succeed in telling them something that is useful or valuable to them.

When I’m speaking, I treat the audience as my customer. I try to give them what I have that they want. This is not altruism so much as a business strategy. Only by pleasing my audience can I subsequently achieve any of my own business goals.

If you represent a startup, the audience will be willing to cut you a little slack. They don’t expect you to be as smooth as George Clooney accepting an award. They will forgive you a stutter or a stammer or even some minor typo in your slide deck. They will even forgive an occasional bug that pops up during your demo of a new product.

But this doesn’t mean you are home free.  The audience is yours to lose and there are many ways that can happen. You can be insufferably boring or ill-prepared; you can overstate your case, pretend to be someone you are not, or otherwise damage yourself by stretching credibility.

You can lose an audience by bad luck. Believe it or not, it is far better to follow a great speaker than one who puts attendees into nap mode. You might find yourself competing with a noisy lunch setup crew just outside your room or at the very worst; you can get caught in a lie.

I’ll address these issues in upcoming chapters.

My new book, Stellar Presentations is 76-pages on length and costs about 10 bucks. I estimate it will take two hours of your time to read it. Four times in the three weeks since I launched the book, people have complained that the book is too short and that I should add more chapters to make it worth the money I’m asking.

As I so often do, let me tell you a story to illustrate a few points:

A woman drives her Mercedes into a garage. The mechanic asks her what the problem is.

“I’m not sure. It just doesn’t sound right when it’s idling,” she says. The mechanic lifts the hood and asks her to start the car. He steps back and listens for a few moments. Then he turns and carefully selects a wrench from the arsenal of wrenches on his workbench. He asks her to race the engine for a second. Listening closely, he selects a different wrench. Then ge tells her to let the engine idle again.

He takes the wrench and taps the carburetor once. The engine immediately starts humming perfectly.

“You’re a genius,” she gushes. “It’s perfect. How much do I owe you?”

“265,” he answers and her jaw drops down.

“You only looked at my car for 5 minutes. How the Hell do you charge me $265 for just tapping my carburetor one time” she demand to know.

The mechanic doesn’t hesitate in his answer. “Lady, I only charged you $15 for the tap. I charged you $250 for knowing where to tap.”

I find it mildly amusing that people who complain about the brevity of my book keeps saying I should add more words  and chapters to it. So far no one has argued that it is over priced.

It took me approximately 350 hours to write the 14,000 words in Stellar Presentations. It took me 30 years as a consultant, a writer and a speaker to acquire the knowledge I put into the book. I wrote a short book because people planning to make business presentations are very busy people.

I think that’s worth ten bucks.

I can make the book longer. I can add a few more of the stories I like to tell. But I will not be able to impart greater wisdom for people who want to understand the strategy of public speaking as well as the specific tips I have on making a talk stellar.

I could make it longer, but that would not make you a more successful speaker. I could charge less money, just like the mechanic could charge less for tapping the carburetor. But I don’t think that would be fair to either my theoretical mechanic or me.

And as far as price goes for either that mechanic or me, you get what you pay for.

I am thrilled to announce I have started writing a column at Forbes.com It’s called ItSeemstoMe, which was the name of my first blog. While my original blog was about anything I wanted it to be, this new column is about issues, trends and news in the tech sector.

I’ve already posted my first and second columns.

As always, I’ll be writing for business audiences about social media and web companies as well as the events surrounding them. I am also still very much interested in startups that have a shot at changing the world. I would also like to profile some of the original thinkers in the technology industry. ItSeemstoMe will be more issue oriented than I have been, looking deeper into issues that are likely to shape how today will become tomorrow.

Above all, I am a sucker for a good story, so please tell me one, so long as it touches on technology and it’s nonfiction.

If you think you have something that fits in, please let me know. The best way is via good old retro email. Put the word Forbes in the subject line and send me 2-3 paragraphs on why you think it would work in my column and some links you think I should see.

I ask you to do only two things first: 1. Read some of my stuff, and 2. Tell me me, don’t sell me.

Earlier this month, I published my fourth book, Stellar Presentations, an Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks on Kindle. The paperback is due out by March 1.  It is a very short book designed to help anyone who needs to make a public presentation, but particularly it is for entrepreneurs at conferences, with the media and investors. While it is a “How-To” book, I wrote it as a story-teller with over 35 years experience.

It is an extremely short book. It will take you a mere two hours to read it. But it took me 25 years of attending media interviews and conferences to gather the wisdom that I share in the book.

Here’s a sample:

Introduction:   But What if I Suck?

I was standing in front of a room filled with Indian entrepreneurs. The event was the annual NASSCOM Product Conclave, that country’s largest gathering of startups and the people who care about them.

It looked like I’d be speaking to a half-empty room, but it turned out that Vinod Khosla, the luminary billionaire Indian-born American venture capitalist was speaking in the room next door. When his session filled up, the overflow drifted in to the next closest venue where I was about to speak.

I was a bit apprehensive.  This was my first visit to India. While, I have Indian friends in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, this was different.

I was not yet sure I understood the culture of India. I had hoped to have a few days to glimpse the country before speaking there, but I had missed my original flight and barely got to Bangalore in time for my scheduled appearance.

So there I was in front of a room filled mostly with people who’d rather be listening to the hometown hero next door, covering a topic I had not previously talked about.

The lights were dimmed. A moderator said a few kind words and all eyes turned to me. A few seconds passed as we checked each other out.

I began by sharing a thought that had occurred to me as the room had filled up: “I’ve been assigned to talk about how to give a great presentation. This is scary. What if my presentation on great presentations sucks?”

A few people laughed. Then almost everyone joined in.  Their faces went from neutral but curious to a look that said they were interested in what else I had to say.

I had made it to first base—or wherever Indians go when they get a hit in cricket, their sport of choice.

My talk went very well. When it was over, a small crowd gathered around me asking me questions. Some followed me out into the hallway. A few inquired about hiring me to consult or coach them.

I am still enjoying online conversations with people who saw that presentation and I’ve been invited to speak again next year. This is important because succeeding at a business-related presentation is merely a first step. The furthest you get is first base. I’ll explain more about that later.

One outcome of that talk is this book.  I realized that the majority of the people who came to see me speak were technology entrepreneurs. They were very well-educated as engineers, but they knew little about the communications issues I covered.

The invitation to speak to startups about how to give great presentations made me realize how much I have learned on the topic over the past 30 years.

I came home to America thinking about the strategic importance of skillful presentations to startups, particularly at the critical moment when they are launching their company or flagship products.

So I decided to write Stellar Presentations, a small book for a niche market that I know and love. This is a book for tech entrepreneurs who need to present at conferences. I hope you find it useful.

I also hope that you find it fun. As I will explain, I believe fun is among the most vastly underrated of all business tools.

Throughout Stellar Presentations, I will share stories about speakers I have known, and why some of them remain fresh in my memory after many years and why some of them, well, memorably sucked.

Please tell me what you think: email: shelisrael1@gmail.com. On Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn, I’m shelisrael.

I have often felt that publishing a book is the closest I–as a male–can come to experience what it’s like to have a baby. Earlier this week, I delivered my fourth, but you would think it was my first because the experience has made me jittery to say the least.

So yesterday, when someone on Twitter pointed me to Jane Friedman’s  Please Don’t Blog Your Book and I was , I was crankier in my tweet response than I should have been. I apologize for the argumentative tone I adopted, but at the core of it, I believe her advice was really bad. I think she  displayed more ignorance than wisdom in her piece and I mean that in the politest of ways.

It’s a subject that I have a good deal of experience exploring and I doubt that I would be enjoying the success that I have– had it not been for how I used social media to interact with people.

My first book was Naked Conversations, co-authored with Robert Scoble. Robert had the heretical idea that we would blog our book as we wrote it. I humored him, reasonably no publisher would allow it. But some smart risk-taking people at John Wiley like Jim Minatel who was instrument in getting our publisher to allow us to publish interview notes and the first drafts of every chapter. This had never been done before, and it has never been repeated, so it may have been that Robert and I went through a brief window that slammed shut after we were done.

I don’t have the stats, but I am willing to bet that most people who followed the book online bought the final product. I know I signed hundreds of copies from people I got to know while blogging the early drafts.

Then all sorts of people from all over the world jumped in. Some corrected facts. Others pruned typos. Still others suggested stories to add and a few of them were the best in the whole book. One follower led a campaign to stop us from calling the book “Blog or Die,” which would have likely hurt us with the corporate readers we targeted.

So first off, bloggers helped us write a better book, far better than if we had worked under the cloak of silence that most traditional publishers required.

But wait, there’s more. When Naked came out, bloggers became our champions. Most of those who were consulting in the enterprise knew most of what we had written, but they loved how we said it and the brought the book into the enterprise where it did quite well. It is often called a seminal blog for business blogging and that would not have happened without the collaboration we enjoyed with hundreds of bloggers all over the world, as we wrote the book.

By the time I wrote Twitterville, social media had changed dramatically. Much of the conversation had moved from blogs onto social networks. My new publisher, Portfolio, was unwilling to let me post early chapters, but they were willing to let me maintain an ongoing conversation about the book and what I was writing about on Twitter.

The result was that over 50% of the stories I wrote about in Twitterville were delivered to me by tweeters. When the book was published, Portfolio did a remarkable job of traditional PR. I got interviewed by almost every major business publication I can think of. But I remain convinced that the word-of-mouth of people on Twitter made my book among the two-or-three most successful of the 43 books published with some derivative of Twitter in  the title.

I didn’t make as much noise in social media with Stellar Presentations, which launched two days ago as a Kindle-only book. This was because, I had originally planned it as a Kindle Single, which requires nothing be published in advance. Now that I’ve changed courses, I will post selected sections in the coming weeks.

But on this the second day, the only way anyone as ever heard of Stellar is on one previous blog post and a few dozen tweets that I have posted. To my surprise and relief, the book is doing quite well, thanks to the support of social media people who are spreading the word–not to benefit me so much–as to tell their friends about something they like.

Friedman noted in our tweeted conversation that she doesn’t acquire books to publish in social media. That explains why she wasn’t a pioneer. But to advise authors of any subject not to blog all or part of their books is pretty backward thinking or so it seems to me.

She knows as does just about everyone else that traditional publishing is in deep trouble. By now she should realize that online distribution and conversations have a great deal to do with the disruption of her profession. My advice to any aspiring author is to follow your reader who now is likely to hang out in social venues, who now is likely to buy books recommended by online peers.

Five times in the last two days I have offered to send my book to people for free. Five times they have refused saying they would prefer to support me by purchasing the book on Kindle.

Has anyone ever said something like that to a publisher? I don’t think so,

I am thrilled to announce that my fourth book, Stellar Presentations: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks has gone live on Kindle. A paperback version should be available by Feb. 22. It is not a social media book.

Stellar Presentations is a brief but deep look at the craft and strategy of presentation. While I focus on startups and conferences, I believe that the book contains useful content for anyone who needs to speak in public.

It is based on my many years experience as a presentation coach, a conference reporter and as a keynote speaker.

It is a very brief book–I guess it will take you about two hours to read. Startups are at their most frantic when preparing to introduce their products, so I’ve tried to cut to the chase and to not waste anyone’s time.

Simultaneously, it covers a lot of ground. Stellar explains the three key questions that starts your preparation process on the right track. It tells you what attendees want from you and what you should expect from them. It explains why credibility is like virginity and why that matters to you as a speaker and it tells you about the secrets of cantaloupe.

It analyzes Powerpoint versus Storytelling, the two most common approaches to a presentation’s structure and it looks at the advantages of being small as a company. It also explains why Steve Jobs was the best presenter in tech history, but why you should ignore what he did on stage.

This is my first self-publishing effort and I had a lot of fun writing Stellar Presentations. To buy, just click on the book cover icon to your right. I’ve tried to make it a fun read as well. Fun makes serious points more memorable as I point out in the book as well.

As a self-publishing project, your feedback is more important to me than it has ever been. And your comments on Amazon will help thers decide if this book is right for them.

Don’t get me wrong. Hell will freeze over before I would ever vote for Newt Gingrich. First, off the man was named for a lizard. Secondly–and more seriously–you can directly track the origins of the current polarization between the two major US political parties on Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker of the House.

And like every candidate in this the most mud-slinging president primary campaign in history, he has been made to look bad in a great many ways. It is hard for me and others to recognize what sometimes happens and that is good ideas come from bad people.

A few weeks back, Gingrich proposed that we build a space colony on the moon and that has been the subject of a great deal of ridicule. Comedians are still having their fun with that one and Tweeters still wonder what Gingrich was smoking.

But wait a minute. Forget who the source is. Think about the idea. We elected the current incumbent because we thought he had a vision for America, because his eloquence fooled us into thinking he could lead better than he has led. And among his early actions was to shut down NASA’s manned space program. Too expensive he said. These are tough times.

So a bunch of our nation’s brightest scientists got laid off and a whole supply chain of human’s got financially hurt in the name of this great frugality.

Years ago, a young visionary president who made great speeches was elected president. In his first, special address to Congress, in his first of three springtimes in office Jack Kennedy said, “Before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

And, as I recall, their was a landslide of comic parody, as well as editorial columns explaining why man could never walk on the moon and besides what would he do once he got there?

The answer, of course, is the reason people should walk on the moon is the same reason why humpback whales jump completely out of the ocean: Because they can.

It seems to me, that what makes us unique from other animals is that our entire history is based on going beyond what we have done. Before we consider the benefits or catastrophes, we simply have to see if we can do it.

Why should man walk on the moon? Because some day, we can build a colony on it? What will we do then? Look around and see what else we can do, where else we can go, we can learn more about the moon, and thus about the earth and our universe and how life got to here and anywhere else that it might exist.

And yes the cost is huge at a time when people are losing their homes. But to me, the cost is an investment, one that will create a great many new jobs that may be more appealing than the manufacturing our current president seems to be focused upon.

What we learn along the way will give the world new technology that is likely to pervade into computing, science, medecine, earth sciences, the classroom and places that we cannot yet imagine.

It seems to me that Newt’s Moon Colony is the only idea I’ve heard from any candidate for president, and what we need more than business managers, speechmakers and ideologues in the White House is someone with vision and leadership capabilities.

No I do not want Newt to be president. But I do think he should be commended–not ridiculed–for this idea which s entirely worthy of consideration and intelligent debate.

Don’t you?