Give it away give it away give it away now...
Spreading the word

More on giving it away

Here are a few links to some good "free stuff."

Jo_twist_1LEWIS PR presentations
If you're interested in the phenomenon of blogging — especially the "impact of blogging on corporate reputations and on the way the media operates" — checkout the three presentations available on the LEWIS PR site. LEWIS recently held a breakfast seminar on blogging in London and have put the three presentations up for everyone to see. The content is of interest. But what I'm impressed with is how they are sharing this info. Slides on the left are in synch with the video on the right, a video of good quality. The way they put this together in Flash is really quick and easy to use. I would love to see a Lawrence Lessig or a Tom Peters presentation in this format online. I need to make some of my own presentations available in this format.

The three presenters are Morgan McLintic, Loïc le Meur, and Dr. Jo Twist. What about the quality of the visuals and delivery in the presentations? These are three bright and articulate people, but yes, I would loved to have worked with the three of them before the presentations and reworked their visuals so that they would better support their key messages, making the experience even better for the audience. Hats off, however, to LEWIS for making these presentations available.

Nancy_duarte_1Duarte on presentation design
Duarte Design, located in Silicon Valley, works with the top companies in the area, from Adobe and Apple, to Sun and Symantec, and Google, HP and others in between. And there's a reason: They absolutely kick-ass when it comes to presentation design. Checkout the presentation visuals they did for Adobe, Cisco, HP, and others here. And they have a couple of case studies here. And here are five great, free "before/after" articles (pdf) by Duarte Design Principle, Nancy Duarte which originally appeared in Presentations Magazine. Great stuff! (I wish Microsft would use these talented folks...).

Snipurl
Speaking of free tips. Guy Kawasaki recommended this site to me for shortening my long urls before pasting them into emails. (Permalinks tend to go to the second line). For example, this permalink to a post from April looks like this:
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/04/giving_up_what_.html

After I run it through snipurl, it looks like this:
http://snipurl.com/kh1a

Comments

jr

Speaking of these "URL-shorteners", a very practical one for the control-freak is http://elfurl.com :

Besides the obvious shortening of the URL, this service prodives access-statistics for each URL, so you can check if/how many people visited that one, great link you shared with them :)

Oh, and thanks for the great tips.

Regards
jr

Morgan McLintic

Garr - thanks for taking the time to review our presentations and to point your readers to them. I'm glad you like the delivery using timed Flash linked to the video. For seminars like this it opens them up to a broader, time-shifted and geographical audience.

Take your point on the PPT visuals reinforcing the message. There is a comfort-factor in having several bullets on the screen, which I try to avoid - but it's a constant battle. Thanks for the feedback.

Jacques

snipurl.com (or if you want it even shorter - snurl.com) provides tracking stats too.

Garr

>I'm glad you like the delivery using timed Flash linked to the video. For seminars like this it opens them up to a broader, time-shifted and geographical audience.
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I love the format! The video is so easy to scroll through on the fly. Really well done. And, yes, it sure opens up the presentation to a lot more than just the 80 live in attendance. I hope to see more of this kind of presentation online. Thanks, Morgan! -G


AndyShen

Just another option to shorten URLs.
http://tinyurl.com/

Bill Harris

Good blog, Garr...anything one can do to improve presentations we deliver (and sit through!) is worthwhile.

As for ways to create shorter URLs, I rather like http://makeashorterlink.com/ . It produces a shorter link as do others, but it has one distinct advantage. When I go to a short link made by the others, I don't really know where I'm going until I get there. http://makeashorterlink.com lets me see the real URL for a few seconds before going there, so I have the opportunity to bail out if it's not really what I want. Check it out (and I'm not affiliated with them at all except for being a happy user).

mprove

new link to Duarte's portfolio: http://www.duarte.com/#1.0.0

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