j's scratchpad

Steven Cohen writes about using weblogs as a presentation medium. I find his post timely because for most of the talks I’ve given, I’ve used this weblog to run the talk. However, for my upcoming talk in Wisconsin, I realized the blog won’t work very well and I should use something more standard, like PowerPoint.

I’m a strong believer in show, don’t tell. When I’m talking about blogs and feeds and such, I much prefer to take people to various Web sites to show the technology. My presentations end up being mostly links. Putting links in PowerPoint and running back and forth between that application and a Web browser doesn’t make much sense to me.

My talk is shaping up to be more texty content and fewer links. I don’t think it will work so well on this blog. For one thing, staring at an outline while a speaker rambles on and on is really boring. For another, it’s even more boring when the text is too small for anyone to read on the screen at the front of the room.

At a talk this spring, I saw a demo of an application for a Mac that makes PowerPoint look like straws, string, and duct tape. I should be more ambitious and find out what it is and use it.

The presentation Steven mentions, Blogs and RSS in Business and Marketing is nifty. Lots of good points. It’s done so that the equivalent of one slide is a blog post.

Addendum 10/9: After reading Marianne’s comment below, I noticed Steven expounds on the idea of a blog as presentation medium.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 3:08 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.