It has been my experience (and I do a lot of talks now, but in a completely different realm) that you can give a talk to ten people, or twenty-eight people, or

It has been my experience (and I do a lot of talks now, but in a completely different realm) that you can give a talk to ten people, or twenty-eight people, or forty-three people, but you cannot give a talk to two kilopeople -- at some point (seems the threshold is a hundred or a gross or somewhere around there) your perception goes from "N people" to "one audience". I find it a lot easier to talk to one audience massing 150 tonnes than to talk to ninety people. At 90 people, there is still a tendency to try to pay some attention to each person. A sea of bodies is different, at least for me. My village-connectedness circuits hand everything over to my city-survival subassembly. As for the rest: know your slides and know your stuff. Try not to know your words, if at all possible; it's way too easy to get creamed by a missing syllable, and you need to be a pretty darned good actor/orator to make a prepared script sound like human speech. Audiences like humans; they're not so big on bipedal assistive technology devices that sound like they're reading untrained vocabulary material.