Presentations this month in Osaka

A couple of months ago I talked about "giving it away" and how doing free presentations is a good way to share your ideas as well as learn from others. This month I've volunteered to give three presentations. The first one I gave last Thursday in the Apple Store on the art of presentation. You can see pictures from that event here.

On blogging
Next Tuesday (Feb 21) I will be presenting on the issue of blogging for Design Matters. I will be talking not about the technical side, though of course, one can not talk about blogging — even at 35,000 feet — without mentioning RSS, etc. I will serve more as facilitator for a discussion which will cover the basics such as what a blog is, the history of blogging, what it means for journalism, marketing, politics, etc. My own unscientific, anecdotal "study" finds that there is a lot of misunderstanding/ignorance about the blogging issue here in Japan outside of the tech community.

I'll be working on putting the presentation together this weekend, so if you have any links that you think are particularly useful, please let me know. And if you know of any blogs that are perfect examples of "a great blog" or examples of "how not to blog" I'd love to hear from you. Anyone in the Kansai area may attend the Design Matters meeting free. (By the way, the poster for the Design Matters presentation was made by a non-designer in about 10 minutes using a template from Apple's Pages. Photo for the poster is from iStockphoto. The image of the poster here is a smaller, low-rez version.)

These books were a good read (especially Scoble's):

Buzz Marketing with Blogs (the "for Dummies" series)
Naked Conversations (the book's blog)

Foreign Executive Women in Japan
Next Thursday (Feb 23) I'll be presenting to the Kansai chapter of FEW (Foreign Executive Women in Japan). The topic is on presentation design and "presenting different." Are their special issues facing female presenters (in the workplace, at conferences, etc.) that you'd like to share? Love to hear from you. For this presentation I believe you must be an expat woman to attend. There is a fee for this meeting as it includes dinner at the Osaka Hilton. See their site for details.

Odds & ends....

New PowerPoint blog
Ellen Finkelstein, author of Syndicating Web Sites with RSS for Dummies (I need that book!) and How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 (and many others) has a new blog on PowerPoint tips.

Microsoft dumps PowerPoint?
Dustin at The People Brand informed me that Bill Kinnon at Achievable Ends is reporting that Microsoft Abandons PowerPoint. (I do not recall being interviewed for that "story.")

Smartboards and presentations?
And can you imagine a larger version of this monitor mounted on a wall? How might this improve (hurt?) a presentation? Thanks to Kathy Sierra for the link.

Comments

[Jacob Bøtter]

Will the slides from the presentation be available afterwards? Would be pretty cool to take a look at how you're going to visualize all this.

[Dan]

Your site and information are amazing. Thank you for sharing all of your insights. Something that has been bugging me though; what template background do you and especially steve jobs use. You know the one that is a gradient with black on the top and blue on the bottom. Does that come in a template or do you create it yourself. I would like to use if for a presentation. Again, keep up the great work.

[Bill Kinnon]

Garr,
I'm a big fan of your blog. Thanks for the link to mine.

[Garr]

>You know the one that is a gradient with black on the top and blue on the bottom. Does that come in a template or do you create it yourself.

That background comes with Keynote. You can do something very similar in ppt -- just use a 2-color gradient (black at top to very dark grey with a tiny hint of dark blue). You can get more control in Photoshop if you like, but it may be possible in ppt to get close... Thanks! -g

[Larry Irons]

I'd just like to see someone bring back Compel...thanks for this resource, I enjoy reading your thoughts on presentation...