@Gary Aston there will always be people who look at success as those things. Me, I’m no web celeb, but I get the odd speaking gig, mainly because I write a lot. However I only write, or speak about what I know – it’s the same sharing. I couldn’t write about any of this stuff unless it came from real experience, on real projects. The same is true for most of the speakers and authors I know in this field. We do interesting things and want to tell people about them 🙂

It is great fun (if a bit scary) to speak at a conference but I’d be sad if anyone thought that my doing that meant I felt I was in some way better than anyone else. Conferences are scary to me because the audience are my peers, I fully expect they’ll be hunting me down afterwards at the coffee break to tell me that I am wrong!