Hopefully, in the past few posts, I convinced you that we do lightning talks every day - the questions are:
1) Do we do them well?
2) How can we improve?
My first advice is to give a lightning talk at a local user's group or conference. If you have never given a presentation before, it's a low-impact way to get into public speaking. If you do big talks at major conferences all the time, then lightning talks are a great technique to hone your points.
-> You can find a short article on giving a lightning talks
here.
-> Mark Jason Dominus's
Presentation Judo has some really good information on how to do a slide - and what not to do.
-> There's a video of Lightning Talks on Google Video
Here.
The video is front an XPWestMichigan Meeting; my talk starts about 28 minutes in. The video and audio aren't that great.
If you can actually hear what I am saying, I may offer an analysis of that lightning talk for next time --- but then again, that's pretty darn meta ...