« May 2008 | Main | July 2008 »
Are you interested in animation? If so, you might want to take a look at MyToons.com, a social network for people interested in the animation industry. There could be potential applications for corporate presenters looking to "spice" up their presentations with an appropriate animation from one of these very talented animators.
Here's a recent animation "Awareness" that uses claymation that was posted on the site.
In today's multi-media era, audiences expect to not only to hear from presenters but to see the "moving pictures" that help tell their story. With the explosive growth of YouTube, users can often find clips there that can help meet this objective. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency on how to download YouTube video files and format incompatibilities between YouTube .flv files and Microsoft acceptable video files don't make this the easiest task. In addition to YouTube videos, many presenters are recording their own videos that are created in QuickTime and struggling to convert these for use in PowerPoint presentations.
So how can you solve these problems? Here are a few recent suggestions that are worth exploring:
The Star Bulletin Tech Writer John Aksalud has written an article "How to Use YouTube Effectively" that delineates the two steps in the process to saving and converting a YouTube video for offline use in your presentations. He provides links to 3 video download services (Keepvid.com, Savevideodownload.com and Savetube.com) and 3 conversion services ( Pazera-Software.com, Flv-to-mp3 and Prism Video Converter)
to help you with this task.
San Francisco Chronicle author David Einstein has another technique for downloading YouTube videos in a recent Q& A column where he references typing in the word "kiss" in the YouTube video URL right after the www. and before youtube in the address. This takes you to the Kiss YouTube site where with one click and the word kiss you can download your YouTube video in .flv format. This video can format can in turn be converted using a tool like Videopiggy. Interestingly the Videopiggy site says that their software will do this in one step, so it appears that the "kiss" aspect of the assignment might be avoided.
I watched a couple of YouTube video in their How To series that provides examples of server based video download and conversion services like MediaConverter.org, Vixy.net, Convertyoube.com, Modifyvideo.com, vconvert.net and flvix.com along with examples and benefits of downloading and converting at your desktop using the services like those referenced elsewhere in this posting. Here's one of the videos that I watched.
Meanwhile, The New York Times Personal Tech columnist J.D. Bierdorfer offers tips on how to convert QuickTime videos to a format like .avi that are supported by PowerPoint by using either QuickTime Pro or services like RAD Video Tools or MediaCoder.
Look elsewhere on this blog for other references for how best to accomplish this task.
Alexei Kapterev has put together a good presentation that is available on SlideShare providing some guidelines to making your presentation more effective. He suggests focusing on 4 items -
The slide show provides a quick view of 61 slides that you can watch here.
Hat tip to Seattle PI, The Biz Bite blogger Whitney Keyes post "How to Give a Great Presentation".
Today's my birthday. I'm 52.
I thought it was only appropriate to take a step back and review how the world of technology has shaped our presentations.
Overhead Transparencies
Technology that supports presentations has changed dramatically since I started my post-graduate career in 1980. When I started my career, platform time was spent with transparencies and an overhead projector. You felt really advanced if you had typed overheads (usually created by a Secretary with access to a typewriter) or some sort of image on the transparency. If you were really cool, you got your marker out and marked on the overhead as you spoke to the audience. You always wanted to make sure you used erasable markers just in case you wanted to re-use the transparency.
35mm and the Word Processing Center
The next phase that I recall was 35 mm slides. We used a production house called 35 West here in the Madison, WI area at 3512 West Beltline Highway. It was a clever play on words and their address.
Getting from our thoughts to the final 35 mm presentation involved a detour through the Word Processing Center. Do you remember Word Processing Centers? If so, you're probably at least 50. I can remember writing up the words that we wanted on slides and having the Word Processing Center type up the notes. Our center was made up of 3 women with their Wang Computers and I think with Office Writer. You'd drop off a handwritten document and they'd type it up for you. You'd mark it up and return it to them for correction.
35 West would prepare our slides always with a dark blue background and yellow and white type. Our template was pretty clear on this. I don't remember what we paid for each slide, but it wasn't cheap. Our slide shows were used by our sales reps and in some cases we did some cool things with muliple projector slide shows for tradeshows using our trays of 35mm slides.
D-I-Y Presentations
Needless to say our Word Processing Center probably lasted for about a year in my early career when the 3 ladies were displaced with the arrival of our brand spanking new computers. We now had the first generation tools to create documents, presentations, etc. While 35 West and 35 mm slides didn't disappear immediately, they were on a rapid trajectory of decline.
In the Harvard Graphics and PowerPoint era, where you had the tools to create and re-create content as you wanted. Clip art was so much fun! You could throw in the spinning figures, cartoons and lots of words to make your point.
What about today? Death by PowerPoint has entered the popular lexicon. We've moved into the multi-media era. Audiences are bored by bullet points, tons of words and monotonous presenters. They are used to watching YouTube and listening to audio clips and expect to always be entertained.
As you look at your history and experience as a presenter using different technology how do you see the future evolving?
Paul J Gibler
the Web Chef
Since presenters are always looking for ways to enhance their presentations visually, I thought I'd share the work of professional cartoonist, Vlad Kolarov. He has 1000+ business/office cartoons and illustrations that can be a nice addition to a presentation. He also creates custom cartoons. His clients include Yahoo Inc., Reader's Digest, CHUM Limited, Renaissance Cards, McGraw-Hill, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, etc. Check out his cartoons at BetterCartoon.com
I've got a few presentations scheduled for the next couple of months, some PowerPoint related and others looking at e-business and technology. Among the presentations currently scheduled:
Looking for a speaker or trainer? Please contact me for one of my standard or custom presentations on a broad range of marketing and communications topics.
Paul Gibler
the Web Chef
I've been a bit lazy in my blog posting lately. Every once in awhile you need a brief hiatus from the thinking, synthesizing, writing and analyzing time that blogging takes.
I wanted to share a couple of resources that were submitted to me for comments and for inclusion on my blog and list of PPT and Presentation resources.
The first of these is a blog called Breaking Murphy's Law, written by Lee Potts, that helps presenters deal with the inevitable problems that are bound to come your way when you're presenting - from stolen equipment, to lost presentations, etc. One of his more popular postings was "Don't give a Pigeon a Perch to Poop From", a cleverly titled posting on planning for the inevitable detractors that will look for that perch during your presentation that they can use to attack you from.
The second resource that was submitted was Slide Executive, software designed to help you manage your valuable presentation assets at the desktop level, workgroup level or enterprise. Instead of constantly wasting time searching for that slide you know you have, but can't remember which presentation it was in, the tool is designed to help inventory your assets in a more effective manner. I haven't tried this out, but will be downloading a trial of their desktop version to see how well it works.
Hat Tip to Branding Blog for the YouTube video.
Rate Me on BlogHop.com!
help?
