PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques

PowerPoint Blogs

Periodically I like to scan the blogosphere to see if there are any presentation or PowerPoint blogs that I haven't tracked down that might provide some valuable insights.  One of the latest that I've identified is the VisiScience Blog, that discusses the use of PPT in science.  They have a number of tutorials that might be useful for those of you using PPT for this purpose.  The blog appears to be published by the sellers of ScienceSlides a vendor that provides a module for scientific slides.

Do you have any recommendations on PowerPoint or presentation skills blogs that I should be tracking? 

Presentation Tips

Periodically I like to see what others are saying about effective presentations.  It is always interesting to get tips and ideas from other presenters including those that are making their presentations outside the business world such as academics, teachers, studentts and clergy. 

Here are a few resources that I found that you might find interesting:

• Mihai Budiu's Rules for Making a Presentation, created when he was at Michigan State. 
• Michael Chial at the University of Wisconsin's Rules for Instructional Presentations
• University of South Dakota's Creating Effective Presentations!

Marketing Sherpa Best B2B Lead Generation Tools

Marketing Sherpa has an interesting article summarizing the research they conducated about the best lead generation tools for B2B marketing.  Interestingly, the number 1 technique is blogs.  Anne Holland, President of MarketingSherpa stated that she suspects it is because of the "search engine friendliness of blogs to the thought leadership your management team can flaunt to build brand value".  Among the other items referenced in the article are to provide your prospects wtih content of value including PowerPoint presentations.  As she says "Content Rules".

NOTE: The article will be available for public viewing through August 8th. 

Pew Internet Report on Bloggers

Pew Internet has released a new report on the state of blogging today.  The 33 page eport follows up on a prior report on blogging that Pew completed in early 2005. 

Some interesting statistics from the report include the following items:

Who blogs (demographics):

• 46% of bloggers women
• 54% of bloggers men
• 54% younger than 30
• 13% live in rural areas
• 60% white
• 11% African American
• 19% English-speaking Hispanic
• 10% some other race

Why people blog:

• 64% to share knowledge or skills
• 76% to document and share personal experiences

What people blog about:

• 37% life and experiences
• 11% politics and government
• 7% entertainment
• 6% sports
• 6% general news and current events
• 5% business
• 4% technology
• 2% religion or faith

How they manage their blogs:

• 87% allow comments
• 41% have a blogroll with their favorite blogs
• 18% offer an RSS feed (see my article on RSS feeds at Wisconsin Technology News)

PowerPoint Attack

Infoworld reports that Symantec has discovered a flaw in PowerPoint that allows hackers to send a trojan horse via a PowerPoint e-mail attachment that takes advantage of a PowerPoint vulnerability to allow"the attackers to control the infected system". 

According to Brian Kreb's at the Washington Post's Security Fix blog, Microsoft is working on a fix and should have it released by August 8th.  Microsoft issued an advisory on the flaw yesterday.

Flickr Photo

Good Wishes Sky for Sunday
Originally uploaded by algo.

What a beautiful image! This conveys serenity, motion and vibrancy in a very natural way.

Yet another way that a picture can tell a story.

PowerPoint Poll

I'd like to find out a bit more about PPT visitors. If you wouldn't mind, let me know about your expertise with PowerPoint.

Quotes worth sharing

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."
Martin Luther King

New Column on RSS in Wisconsin Technology News

The second column in an ongoing series that I write for Wisconsin Technology News was published yesterday.  This column discusses the importance of RSS and supplements the earlier postings I made on e-Bytes on learning more about RSS and promotional uses of RSS.

PowerPoint Humor and Spoofs

Laura Bergells at Maniactivce.com has a posting about a YouTube movie about PowerPoint. Having watched the video, I thought it would be worth embedding it here and letting more of you enjoy the humor.