WeakPoint

In a post titled How Would The Civil War Have Ended If Lincoln Had PowerPoint? Brad Feld writes:

I have a long set of rants about how most PowerPoint presentations suck.  Every now and then, I see a great one, but most of the time I’m just tortured by them. Today, I got an email from Ted Dolotta (one of the first Softbank-related people I ever met) that was priceless.  It linked to the The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation.  In addition to being a classically miserable presentation, Lincoln’s intro was perfect.

I share Feld's antipathy for PowerPoint presentations.  I've never seen one that did anything but distract me from the speaker--in fact, I once attended a three-day conference where around 75% of the speakers relied on PowerPoint in a darkened room.  Which presentations were memorable?  The 25%  where I watched a human face "illustrate" the points the speaker was making with facial expressions!  A clever device, this human face, with its ability to form mnemonics that really work.

That said, I taught myself some rudimentary PowerPoint skills last week, in order to create a "sketch" of the Kerabu website's search page for the programmer to work from.  It ended up looking quite pretty, so I turned it into a site demo, and have sent copies to a few people, intending that they would look at it on their pc's, without commentary.  Will I ever project it up on a screen in a lecture hall and hide behind it while addressing a crowd?  If I do, I guess I'll have to eat my words, which has happened before.  It's important to injest a few words now and then for maximum health and balance--a bit like chromium picolinate or copper.  Here's the front page of the presentation:

Comments

[Gabe Rosenbush]

Hillarly : Loved your article in August issue of INC. Tried to get Cool Business ideas blog and found that the site has been suspended. Did you know this?