So yeah, this is my lame attempt to win a Mac Airbook in the Slideshare competition. But greed is not my reason. I was happily reading my gmail this morning and someone spammed me to go look at his/her entry. And it was so bad I almost spit my cheerios across the room. And as I paged through the other entries, it got worse. I had to stop. If you are reading this, dear Slideshare viewer, you are seeing one of the rarely used features of both PowerPoint and thus Slideshare - the notes field, where it is intended for speakers to not only prompt them for key points but also to provide extra information to the viewer via printed versions. And when you upload a big old PowerPoint to Slideshare, it automatically adds them to your slide. It is like, oh, yeah, METADATA, As a side note, I have been nagging the Slideshare folks for years to make it so URLs are automatically turned into links when published to their site, and even offered to send them a good grep expression to do this. It is drop dead easy. But who am I? Nobody. But only about 0.001% of PowerPoint users add notes (I am making that number up, but I bet it is small). And this is one of my gripes- that the Presentation file is not the presentation - see http://cogdogblog.com/2008/04/27/presentation-not Now see, don’t you wish Slideshare had made that a real link? Not such a silly idea. But so often I read a blog about a presentation and I go to look at the thing on Slideshare…and I am thumbing through images and word slides feeling like I am looking at random images in some freshman Psychology experiment. If people synch recorded audio and/or add relevant info to their notes field, as I am doing here, then we get more MEAT to the presentation. And in this particular presentation, there are lots of things in the notes! Comments! Context! Snark! Think of it as the voice of the presentation… And have I mentioned how much I love Guy Kawaski and have read his blog for like 25 years? I really dug the panel session he emceed at SXSW last year. Oh, he is a judge on this contest? I did not do that! Do you think I would be so lame as to kiss ass in my comments? Maybe. So this is my bit on “The Last PowerPoint”.
I have served this next image up before, but I base a lot of my work on observations of things I see, silly road signs, strange activities of our government, or just patterns I see in other people. It takes very little effort to make fun of bad PowerPoints, it happens all the time http://www.google.com/search?q=death+by+powerpoint and even becomes a career stichk http://www.beyondbullets.com
There is nothing in PowerPoint that generates bad presentations. It sits there inert until someone touches the keyboard or yanks those ufly clip art images from the menus. But behind every awful PowerPoint presentation is the person who sat down and crafted it. Okay, I admit, this image is an unauthorized modification of a ThinkGeek t-shirt http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/gaming/713e/zoom/ I love ThinkGeek stuff, buy their shirts all the time for friends! Please don’t sue me! Would you believe I am a pal of Guy Kawasaki? Did not think so.
