It happened to be a “kick off” meeting that Daniel and I went to during the lunch hour on Seattle U’s campus. So we got to learn a bit about the program thing. It’s an interesting program… the meeting we went to was at the local university so it was filled with a bunch of college kids (and free sandwiches and drinks!), but the general idea is that every meeting has four or five speakers (maybe 5-10 minutes each?), each of whom are evaluated on the spot for a number of different things (they count your “um”s and “ah”s, they grade you on body language, voice projection, etc). If you do 10 speeches then you become a CTM (Competent Toast Master). Then you go to Bronze, Silver, and finally Distinguished Toast Master (DTM). There are area competitions and all kinds of other things. It’s half way between a video game, a support group, and a cult. It’s right up my alley, really.

For each of the 10 speeches there are areas to focus on, but you can choose the topic. To me, I think it’s just going to be another kind of blogging. It’s the full circle of content creation and self-expression: talking to people in real life, writing people letters in real life, writing email, writing on a blog, recording voice directly to a blog, recording speeches and posting them to a blog… pretty soon I’m probably going to start talking to people in real life again!