Slide:ology

I just finished Nancy Duarte's book, Slide:ology. I've recently become interested in presentation development, not because I give many presentations anymore, but primarily because I think presentations shared online through services like Slideshare have the potential to be good vehicles for visual explanations.

My overall impression of the book? Excellent! It should be required reading for anyone who has to develop or give presentations. She starts with an overview of the need for better presentations, discusses some basic prerequisites like identifying audience needs and touches on ideation and story development briefly. The majority of the book though focuses on design aspects of presentations and slides. Lots of good, useful information. I outlined the basic content of the book in a mind map, below. Take a look then buy the book.

Social Media & Internet Marketing Presentation

Yet another presentation about social media. There's already thousands of other presentations on social media available. Why another one? Inspired by Cliff Atkinson's book, "Beyond Bullet Points," I've taken a renewed interest in presentation development. There once was a time as a corporate drone where I developed a lot of boring bullet point presentations. I really like presentations as a medium for visual explanations (they're visual, interactive and user-paced) especially with sites like SlideShare.net that makes it so easy to share presentations.

Social Media&Internet Marketing

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

Much of the content in this presentation is HEAVILY influenced by several other presentations out there, including, Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3 and Marta Kagan's "What the F**k is Social Media?" The main difference is that I tried to develop the presentation around the structure that Cliff Atkinson outlines in "Beyond Bullet Points" - developing a story outline before even opening up PowerPoint.

As a web developer, I manage several websites for several small businesses and organizations. Over the last few years, it has become apparent that just having a website isn't enough for businesses and organizations. It's the minimum mandatory requirement. But to really join the Internet of the 21st century, businesses and organizations need to adopt a social media marketing strategy. I wanted to develop a presentation myself that I could share with my clients that explains why they should jump on the social media band wagon. Any constructive feedback appreciated.

Creating a Free Blog with Blogger Presentation

Several weeks ago I created a really simple presentation illustrating the process of signing up for a new blog account with Blogger. It's an incredibly simple and basic presentation, but I run into enough people who aren't that savvy with computers or online applications, so I thought a really basic tutorial that walks these kinds of people through the process might be a useful resource to have available. At least when people ask me, "How hard is it to set up my own blog?" I now have somewhere to point them.

Creating a Free Blog with Blogger Presentation

Next up will be some follow-up online visual explanations on how to create a blog post, mark things up in it, add links, add photos, etc.

Intereactive Hurricane Tracker Visualization

Stamen Design just released their latest work, an interactive hurricane tracker for MSNBC, just in time for Gustav.



Great interactive visualization in my opinion. Hover your mouse over different parts of the track to get specific information about that part of the visualization. This visualization will no doubt go in my Visual Zen Gallery.

Visual Thinking & Ideas V3

More good feedback from people on this on the VizThink forum. Through discussion on that forum, I realized I'd blundered. The original graphic I did was just trying to show the difference between getting ideas out of people's head vs getting ideas into people's heads. In the Dan Roam lexicon, it was a "what" problem I was trying to show.

After getting feedback about the procedural nature of visual communication, the problem really became a "how" problem - best shown with a flow chart. Rather than realize that at the time, I just tried to adapt my original graphic, and to complicate it, I had mind maps, um... on my mind. So, I just provided a good example of using the wrong kind of graphic to communicate something. Doh! Oh well. Live and learn.

So, version 3 below is an attempt at more of a procedural "how" depiction. I suppose a true flow chart should conform to little boxes representing each process and arrows between the processes. But I've done so many typical flow charts in my former corporate life that I wanted to go with a more graphical depiction (plus I'm feeling lazy and want to recycle elements from the previous versions). I've also shown it as cyclical to try to show the iterative nature of it.

Visual Thinking and Ideas Part 2

After getting good comments from Tom and Tom and Christine, plus Ryan Coleman in the VizThink forum about the Visual Thinking and Ideas post, I thought I'd revise the graphic for it. Results below:

Back of the Napkin Digital Mind Map

After creating a hand sketched Back of the Napkin mind map awhile back, I wanted to create it in a digital format that I could easily refer to. Dan Roam recently made some of his tools downloadable on his website, so I decided to create a Flash-based mind map with links to Dan's PDFs. Click on the image below to see the result.