W00t! I love 8/8/08. Too bad I couldn’t make anything special happen today. So I’ll have to settle for sharing great links instead!

Let the games begin!

• 21 Online Free Web-Based Applications
• The Real Problem with PowerPoint
• 24 Things to do When Stuck for a Topic to Blog about Blog Post Idea Farm…: Personally, best tip is to stock up on entries when you’re in that write frame of mind. I haven’t been in the write frame of mind due to personal commitments and can’t expand on any of the ideas I have piled up.
• Should you write to women differently than men? Admit it… women like emotional words while men like aggressive, matter of fact speak. I attended a conference made primarily of women and a speaker said that women are emotional. The men laughed, but we all admitted it’s true. Look, I believe in not treating pink stuff as girlie and blue stuff and boyish — but after having a girl and two boys (and the boys are different from each other), nature controls some things including gender preferences. I’ve seen many studies show how boys tend to talk with action and girls sit together facing each other while talking with many words.
• Ready for the Olympics? Get ready with 8 Attributes of an Olympic Mind Set — works for any career including writing.

For fun because we’re allowed…

• Smallest solar racing car: I LOVE remote controlled toys. It’s the only thing I consistently played with in my childhood (No dollies for me) and still play in my mamahood. My son received a remote control boat for his birthday and we love playing with it in the pool. Someday, I plan to get a helicopter — not a little one that flies in the house and you can barely control.
• Passive-aggressive (and just plain aggressive notes)
• Raising Small Souls’ “Animal School” teaches a valuable lesson. As I mentioned before, my son’s medical program takes up a lot of my time these days and this movie is exactly about what we’re trying to do for him.

It’s not PowerPoint’s fault that presentations have become boring and useless. After all, it just supplies the tools and it’s what we do with it that matters. Found this Hugh MacLeod PowerPuke cartoon that captures my thought perfectly.

Sure, PowerPoint comes with templates. Again, people don’t customize the presentation for their audience’s needs. They just fill in the headings and bullets without giving much thought. This compelled me to start this list of great examples.

Many of the examples are based on slides than on a person giving the presentation. After all, I rely heavily on slides. When they tell me something without making me read a book and give me an idea of what the speaker is saying (keeping me on cue if I am able to understand the speaker), then it’s most likely a great presentation.

Please email or post a comment if you know of others. (Spam sites need not apply.)

Updated: 6 April 2011

Presentations

1. 5 Ways to Make PowerPoint Sing! (And Dance!)
2. 10 Rules for Killer Business Cards 2010 Edition
3. Banish Boring Presentations
4. Beyond Monetization: Build Lasting Value Through Social Media
5. The Brand Gap based on the best-selling book.
6. The CommonCraft Show: Known for its Social Networking in Plain English — high energy and fast-paced presentations. I wanna be like them!
7. Debunking Third World Myths with Hans Rosling
8. Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 and Who’s the Dick on My Site?
9. Effective PowerPoint Presenting
10. Flickr: All about pictrs
11. Footnotes: How feet can be entertaining.
12. Garr Reynolds of PresentationZen on presentations @GoogleTalks.
13. Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
14. Gore speech on global warming
15. Guy Kawasaki Truemors presentation
16. History of the Button: Pick any button…
17. How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams by Jason Fried of 37Signals. I’ve heard (seen) him speak and he kept my attention — I could actually follow along and cared about what he had to say.
18. I Am the Media: On word of mouth.
19. Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann
20. An Introduction to Visual Thinking
21. Kill Bullets
22. Meet Henry, Mr. MBA who doesn’t know spit about presentations. Now Meet Everyone.
23. Logic + Emotion and One Year Later
24. Panipuri: Presentation on a food item.
25. Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 slides then sit the hell down.
26. PowerPoint 2007 Design Fashion Trends
27. Present! Re-thinking presentation design
28. Shift Happens: Everyone I knew was talking about it including a middle school principal, a university professor, family, and business colleagues. It’s rare when a topic crosses all parts of my life (business, personal, and educational). It caught so many people’s attention that information visualizing firm Xplane helped tweak it. The story behind the presentation and its wikispaces page.
29. Sky McCloud Presentation: Cartoonist Scott McCloud’s daughter tells about their trip across the country in a creative way.
30. Social Media: Good except for the blinding red slides.
31. Sustainable Food Lab: An organization bringing sustainability to food systems.
32. Steve Jobs’ iPod Introduction: I read about the presentation in The Perfect Thing, which had me in awe. Remember I don’t hear presentations very well, so reading about it had an impact — thus, the real thing had to be as great as it sounded. Of course, the iPhone and Macintosh (1984) introductions. Slides from the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference.
33. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design): Contains many great presentations — not many examples of slides. TED blog.
34. Thirst: We all need to do our part to help with the water crisis or prepared to be thirsty… and when we go without water for a week…
35. Translation as Vocation: Exactly that.
36. Two states of matter they didn’t teach you about in school [PPT file]: My third grader came home from school and asked me how many states of matters there were. I answered three: Solid, liquid, gas. He told me there were five. We researched this on the Internet and this PowerPoint presentation was the first thing we found. That’s all it took for us to understand it.
37. Unlocking Cool: What a trend hunter does.
38. Usability Anonymous: 12 Step Program for Better User Experiences
39. Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka
40. What Is Design?
41. What the **** Is Social Media? One year later…
42. WOMM: Why word of mouth marketing works.
43. Zimbabwe in Crisis: Breaks my heart.

Resources

1. 10 Modern Powerpoint and Keynote Templates that Deliver Clear Presentations: Awesome templates.
2. 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time: Design ideas for when you need to show changes.
3. 43 Folders Best Presentation Tips
4. Absolute PowerPoint: Can a Software Edit Our Thoughts? [pdf file] By Ian Parker — From The New Yorker
5. Alltop Public Speaking blogs
   
6. American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches
7. Animotoritize: Help Banish Boring Business Presentations
8. Bad, bad, bad presentation. Do the opposite!
9. The Best Kept Secret of Great Presentations includes examples of great presentations
10. Beyond Bullet Points teaches how to tell a story with PowerPoint without resorting to useless templates. Think of it as presentation turned into visuals. Fabulous book and resource.
11. Brainy Betty: PowerPoint templates.
12. Briefcase Books: What Makes a Great Presentation? [pdf file]
13. Death by PowerPoint (YouTube version) and SlideShare version
14. Doc Searls’ It’s the Story, Stupid
15. Don Norman’ In Defense of PowerPoint
16. Ellen Finkelstein’s PowerPoint section
17. Guy Kawasaki on 10-20-30 presentation rule (video) and blog entry
18. “How to” Visual Effects in PowerPoint
19. The London Speaker: Toastmasters of London with plenty of good info.
20. m62 visualcommunications: Resources and tips.
21. MasterViews: Tons of tips, articles, and resources on presentations
22. Mother Tongue Annoyances: Lose the ums!
23. Official PowerPoint Home Page: Templates, training, articles, downloads and more
24. PowerPoint Extreme Makeover: Too long, but good info.
25. The PowerPoint FAQ
26. PowerPoint for Educators: Tricks and samples
27. PowerPoint in education: Many resources and samples.
28. PowerPoint in education: More examples of using PowerPoint in the classroom.
29. PowerPointless: Waving Goodbye to Bad Presentations
30. Presentation Revolution: Great stuff on storytelling
31. Presenters Online: Epson-sponsored resource for multimedia knowledge
32. Presenters University: Resources, articles, and forum
33. Seth Godin’s The Hierarchy of Presentations
34. Seth Godin’s Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it) [pdf file]
35. SlideBoom: Share live presentations online.
36. slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. Book’s companion site.
37. Slideshare: Share presentations online.
38. Sucking the Suck Out of Presentations
39. Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes: Download the complete text.

Blogs

1. Bert Decker
2. Brad Montgomery
3. Business Presentations
4. Communication Nation
5. Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog
6. Great Public Speaking
7. Guy Kawasaki’s Pitching and Presenting posts
8. Indezine: Blog and free PowerPoint templates.
9. The Extreme Presentation Blog doesn’t like Guy’s 10-20-30 rule and makes a good point. About time someone argued against the rule. Seriously — how many people follow this rule? Many of the great presentations don’t.
10. Pistachio Consulting Blog
11. PowerPoint Blog by TLC Creative has a pre-show checklist for downloading so you can verify all systems go or fix anything that’s stalled.
12. PowerPoint without Bullet Points Blog
13. The Presentation Examples Blog
14. Presentation Helper
15. PresentationZen: Wonderful blog on everything presentation. Garr published a book on the topic.
16. Professionally Speaking
17. Public Speaking Blogs list
18. Six Minutes and its massive list of public speaking blogs
19. slide:ology
20. Speaking about Presenting
21. Speak Schmeak
22. Speak to Lead
23. Tony’s PowerPoint Weblog
24. The YouBlog: Ideas on presentations, persuasion, selling, and communications.

Fun and Humor

1. Claymation with PowerPoint
2. How Not to Use PowerPoint
3. Origins of PowerPoint plus a sequel and other shows
4. PowerPoint Ballad
5. PowerPoint Karaoke: Make a PPT file of multiple presentations slides and cue ‘em. Each singer ad libs a presentation.
6. Presentation Pitfalls: Don’t Let This Happen to You Can you find all of the errors?
7. Read at Work makes it possible to read fiction and poetry… after all, it’s in PowerPoint and it looks like a real desktop.
8. Tim Lee PowerPoint comedy

Beyond Bullet Points is an excellent book that shows you how to create effective presentations with PowerPoint. The software isn’t the reason presentations have turned dull and unfocused — but the abuse of using the templates. PowerPoint templates come with generic phrases and some users don’t bother changing the headers.

Kids today learn how to use PowerPoint in school to use for presentations. If they’re anything like my daughter, they love to go wild with lots of colors and animation. Since they rarely give the kind of presentation found in the templates, maybe there’s hope kids will move away from the generic style.

Some colleges like University of Chicago require submitting a few slides of PowerPoint as part of their admissions process — to give the students a chance to show their creative side.

The book recommends focusing on telling a story along with using a theme/motif. If you’re going to squeeze text to take up all the space in every slide — then you might as well as e-mail the presentation. No one wants to hear a presenter read the slides. The author’s site, Sociable Media, provides templates for creating presentations. But the book explains how to go about using the templates.

What memorable presentations have you seen or given? What made them successful?

The book begins with absorbing insight into the life of the drones and queen bees. The queen bee sits all day while her slaves service her and feed her royal jelly that no one else can have. Who knew the world of bees could be fascinating and resemble the corporate world?

Death By PowerPoint takes a satiric approach in exploring what’s what in the corporate world. Flocker describes employee personalities and situations, and explains how to deal with them, or rather protect yourself and stay under the radar. Casual Friday? What do you do? Even something simple as casual Friday can make a worker bee fret. Get tips on dealing with “fashionipulation” for manipulating your world with clothes.

Learn how the cubist culture got started and what cube decorations say about a person. The elephant in the room doesn’t exist as the book punches the art of politics in the face. Throttle a passive-aggressive communicator’s attempts to take advantage of you and protect yourself from the backstabber. The corporate lingo chapter covers original and “I wish I had thought of that” terms. It doesn’t rehash too many of the terms heard in the corporate halls.

The e-mail etiquette chapter offers little new material, but the book would be incomplete without it. Rarely does an office skip the mandatory fun events, so prepare yourself for that upcoming team-building session with the “Mandatory Fun” chapter.

Funny quotes and curious facts appear sprinkled throughout the pages along with sticky notes and abused bathroom door characters. Beware there are R-rated words and scenarios such as the chapter on office romance, but not too much.

Anyone reading this must take care in deciding whether to follow advice since some wouldn’t fare well for the worker bee while others could lead to a memorable moment at the office. Death By PowerPoint offers tips and a much needed laugh at the dysfunctional corporate world. Treat the book more as a humorous one rather than a self-help book.

Anyone needing comic relief or an escape from the throes of the corporate world should grab this easy and fun read. Like Office Space and Scott Adams’ Dilbert, Flocker uses words exaggerate the corporate life and provide tips for surviving The Office-like environment without going insane.

Title: Death By PowerPoint: A Modern Office Survival Guide
Author: Michael Flocker
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306815125
Date: November 2006
Format: Paperback
Pages: 219
Cover Price: USD: $12.95 Amazon: $10.36

Over the last few years, comments have popped up on how PowerPoint ruins many presentations. That’s backward. Presenters ruin presentations by using PowerPoint. PowerPoint isn’t the criminal here. The crime comes from people not using creativity in designing their presentations. Weird Is Good (near the end of the article) took a ingenious approach in a lecture on the Civil War. Here’s a quote:

Now I had the leisure to ramp up my presentations. I clicked on the PowerPoint icon and wandered into the realm of digitally enhanced oration. Most historians consider images, bullet points, and film clips show-biz flash. If old-time audiences could sit and listen to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas discuss slavery for hours without photos or outlines, why can’t modern students endure a lecture about their debates without the indulgence of eye candy?

I sympathize with those retro sentiments. We have all watched computerized slide shows induce brain-deadness in otherwise vibrant human beings. They stare blankly at the screen and repeat every word that pops up there like zombified parrots. Instead of revolutionizing academic presentations, PowerPoint has — and this is a true miracle — dulled them further.

Jon T. Coleman, the professor who wrote the article, put “punk” in the PowerPoint as he discussed facial hair. Yes, facial hair.

I use the tour of Civil War facial hair to teach two lessons. The tour is a fun way to demonstrate how to raise a historical question, find a thesis, and formulate an argument. It’s an exercise in essay writing.

But it’s also a goof. I’m not really interested in discovering why generals and politicians on both sides of the most deadly struggle in American history grew such fabulous whiskers. I wanted to do something strange and pointless with PowerPoint. And in so doing, I hoped to make academe a little better.

Not weird. Imaginative!

Doing Presentations Right

Maybe it would help to treat every presentation as if the computer or device that contains the presentation will die minutes before the presentation begins. You have a backup computer? OK, what if that backup dies, too? Not likely? Regardless, the point is to avoid letting PowerPoint be the presentation. If you need inspiration, Metaphorically Selling is a great resource for coming up with innovative ways to present information.

Good speakers use PowerPoint or whatever application as a complementary tool to their presentation. But too often, presenters succumb to PowerPoint like a boss I had in the past would would read the slides and then add a little commentary before moving to the next slide. Edward Tufte declared PowerPoint is evil because of presenters like my boss. Boomberg’s Andrew Ferguson shares his beef with PowerPoint.

How often do we get to use creativity? A presentation offers the opportunity to exercise our imaginations and put it to good use. MasterViews provides many resources, tools, and ideas for creating successful and memorable presentations. Next time you need to do a presentation, rather than thinking of how much work it is and how it interferes with your busy day — consider it an opportunity to do something different and stand out.

It’s stuff like this that steer me away from fancy words whether or not I know what they mean. Say what? The title of the paper in question, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy.” The article says, “But the four-page send-up, laced with confounding graphs, was accepted by an international conference that itself sounds like a spoof: ‘The Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.’”

And this is the reason why say those with a PhD are not necessarily the best professors or authors in the world — “The reason something like that can slip by editors without an eye blink is that a lot of people in academia think, speak, and write that way — and they’re hardly alone.”

Some of the best professors I had in college didn’t have PhD by their names just an MA, MS, or MBA. Years ago, I had a boss who was a PhDer. Boy, did she give the most boring talks! She’d read the presentation slides word for word and add pointless commentary. It’s folks like this who led Edward Tufte to get tough on PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is not the problem. The people using it are. Can’t tell you how many managers asked me to “put it all in there” where I was forced to shrink the font so the audience will have to squint and discover new wrinkles. They probably don’t hear a word the presenter says since they’re working overtime to read the slides. I tried advising otherwise, but pointless battle.

I like them Bullfighter folks. I take them over White Smoke hands down. I didn’t have to download White Smoke to see what a load of bull it is. This screen shot comes from the splash presentation where only the last sentence passes muster. The company is blowing smoke… not a good company name, ya think?

I decided to try out the program to see what it does. I took many screen shots of its “suggestions” that I need to extend this entry. Guess what? It made suggestions on its own material! I copied and pasted the extended entry to use as the example.

(start of WhiteSmoke test) I went ahead and downloaded the trial to see if it lives up to the bull. I expected to fill out a form before downloading, but why should I have to share my profession and my country? You can easily track countries using Web stats. At least, I don’t have to share my name and age.

This is the second time I’ve come across a case sensitive form. You have to enter your email address twice. Roboform does it the first time and in all caps (Why? I don’t know.) and I had to do the second one and I often do email in lower case. The form said they didn’t match.

The program and Web site often use the word “enrichment.” That would go on my bull list. I wouldn’t want such a word in my slogan, mission, or vision. It’s hoity toity and so is the use of “did not” instead of “didn’t.” One of the questions asks, “How do I enrich my text?” That’s not how most people would ask that.

Check out the answer to What is WhiteSmoke? (Notice its own spellchecker doesn’t recognize the product’s name.)

WhiteSmoke has created a unique technology, providing the first context-related all-in-one solution for improving writing. This patent-pending technology is the result of years of development by a leading team of software, algorithm and Natural Language Processing experts.

For the first time ever, users can enhance their writing skills with WhiteSmoke. This revolutionary writing tool instantly analyzes the complete text (in e-mail or Word documents) and provides context-based recommendations to replace words with synonyms, add adjectives and adverbs, check spelling and verify proper grammar use.

In today’s competitive and demanding environment, a smart solution for high quality writing is essential.

I guess I am in “critic” mode today. (End of WhiteSmoke test)

Click either of the above images to see results showing the markup of the text. Red is a misspelled word and blue has suggestions for other words.

Notice at the bottom, there’s no way to see the rest of the “suggestions?” I can’t scroll anymore. I tried toggling full screen mode, but I couldn’t access it. It appears in the task bar, but click on it does nothing. Can’t resize the window either.

This costs $49.95 PER year??? The program also adds a toolbar to Microsoft Word and it didn’t fare better than the previous example. It also adds a toolbar to Outlook and Outlook Express, but these require a reboot (Word doesn’t). I got a follow up email from the company (follow up is good… but the first sentence is awful…)

“We hope your evaluation period of WhiteSmoke software is according or better than expectations.” Yeah, sure. I’ve uninstalled it. Thanks, I’ll stick with the free and better program, Bullfighter.

The following images show the program’s “suggestions.”