For leaders, managers and anyone who speaks and expects someone to listen, Scott Berkun shares an insider's perspective on how to effectively present ideas to anyone. Loosely based on his third book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, this fun, interactive webcast brings you lively lessons and insightful confessions, giving you new insights into the art of persuasion--as well as teaching and learning--directly from a master of the trade. Bring your toughest questions and situations for Scott to answer or solve. Attendance is limited, so register now!

More Upcoming Webcasts and Online Conferences:

• DRBD and MySQL - An HA Match Made In Heaven
• Using ICT (Information & Communications Technology) to Create a Sustainable Business
• Where 2.0 Online Conference - An Emphasis on iPhone Sensors
• Velocity Online Conference - Fast by Default

Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

After posting some thoughts a month ago about Erving Goffman's classic sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I heard from a reader who urged me to try out a deeper work of Goffman's, Frame Analysis (Harper Colophon, 1974). This blog presents the thoughts that came to mind as I made my way through that long and rambling work. Although the Internet tends to strip away the external meanings Goffman recorded, we still bring our real-life frameworks into online interactions. Read more.

Holiday Gift Guide — Need a gift for the hard-core geek in your life? How about the DIYer or digital photographer? O'Reilly has something for every techie and crafter on your list, from hobbyist to pro. Check out our Gift Guide to see our new titles, and pick up some great gifts for the holidays. Give O'Reilly.

English Shellcode (PDF) -- paper presented at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, showing how to encode arbitrary x86 shell code (the payload in a malware or other attack that elevates privileges and pwns your machine) as something that looks, at first glance, to be English text. Impressive piece of work. This and more in today's Four Short Links. Read more.

Metadata has the ability to give us context to the media we are dealing with. It also makes for an interesting data source. Using the Flash Platform we can combine information all ready contained in files that you are using along with web services to create an interesting user experience. This tutorial will combine id3 metadata from your mp3's to power an Flickr image search. Our final output will be an AIR application written with Flex Builder 3. Read more.

When Twitter decided to slowly roll out a new, official retweeting feature, people waited in anticipation. When it actually became available, people almost universally disliked it. But my post is about why I love the new Twitter retweet feature, without ever having to think about it. The reason is that official retweeting represents the new-new arms race for authority among power users. Read more.

Continuing my effort to spare newcomers to Drupal from falling into this powerful content management system's most common traps, this time I look at a frequent cause of white screens - the sudden and scary devolution of a previously healthy Drupal site into a blank browser window. This can be caused by coding mistakes, such as neglecting to conclude a line of custom PHP with a semicolon. Read more.

While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer (me), to question my skills and even my sanity, to attack Ladislav Bodnar for posting the review, to blame the hardware, anything at all but the distro code which is, according to some, "the best release ever". Read more.

• How to make data more digestible for presentations
• How iPhone sensors work in concert to determine orientation
• How Microsoft manages their web traffic load

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Watch Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

Find news coverage and the latest photos and video, plus the full session schedule at the Web 2.0 Expo site.