Dirty Tricks of Presentors 92
A reader writes "Perl expert Mark Jason Dominus gave a great talk last month in St. Louis on how to give a good conference presentation.
There's nothing specific to Perl, and a lot of people
said they thought it was the most useful talk at the conference even though they didn't think they'd be doing a conference presenation any time soon. Mark also wrote up some notes
that explain the parts he forgot to put on the slides."
OT: Slashdotting your content providers (Score:1, Interesting)
Since the forum usually provides the Google cache or mirroring functionality themselves, I think it would be prudent to make these improvements to Slashdot/Slashcode. Volunteers?
Now THAT is Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
Before it starts he says "How many people have taken $OTHER_TUTORIAL_NAME I gave last year?" .... to those who raise their hands he says "Well, you should go find something else to do, because $THIS_TUTORIAL is the same as $OTHER_TUTORIAL, only the name has changed"
Never mind that by the time these people get back to registration, find another tutorial they want to see, exchange their materials, and get to the new tutorial, they'll have missed a good chunk of the "replacement" tutorial which they paid good money for. Nevermind those folks who don't want to do some-other-tutorial, so now they're completely out the money and have to try and fight the conference organizer to get their money back.
Dominus is the last person who should be giving pointers on presenting. He's the only person on my list of presenters for whom "Hell will freeze over, Satan will ice-skate to work, before I go see him speak".
Re:OT: Slashdotting your content providers (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, if ANY single host starts slamming my site with HTTP requests, I'll instantly assume that its a DOS attack. This means I'll either block that address, or I'll shut down completely until the "attack" passes. What would the results of this "test" be from the point of view of the one doing the testing. Granted, if you're testing CNN, you'll probably never notice. But if you're testing some small site, they might pay more attention.
Mirroring the site in advance creates a potential legal grey area. If permission to mirror is required, and legally it is unless the author provies a GNU type license for the material, then the author would need to be contacted in advance, a process that can take hours easily. Who wants to wait 6 hours when you can link NOW?
Google caches are only available for those sites that have been around for more than a couple months, and even then the content is probably out of date. If slashdot is linking to something that's been around for a while, this isn't a problem, but if they're linking to something that's happened hours or minutes ago (which 90% of the slashdot headlines refer to), then google won't help much. And google won't cache the images, they still hit the original site, and typically 90% or more of the data from a site is graphics anyways. There are plenty of karma whores who will copy/paste the text part of articles/pages, and submitters will include google links on the occasions that they're available.
And the best solution to the slashdot effect is for the website administrators to configure the webserver properly. Bandwidth is only part of the problem. The other problem is caused by servers locking up due to excessive resource allocation. Once a server starts thrashing, all hope is lost, the server will be receiving requests faster than it can respond to them.
-Restil
God what a crappy presentation (Score:1, Interesting)
Second, put all of your fucking points on a slide - don't make me click through 5 fucking html pages just so that I can read the contents of one pathetic slide.
According to the slide notes, there are 43 slides in that presentation, which I presume took 45 minutes. That means about 1 slide per minute - wow! A good idea for real presentations: If you're doing 45 minutes, have NO MORE THAN 13 SLIDES. Rule of thumb: expect each slide to take about 5 minutes to talk to. Anything less than that and you're boring your audience, because you're (a) reading your slides instead of talking to the crowd, which is BORING, or (b) you're spending too much time at the podium clicking your fucking mouse. The more time you spend behind the podium, the choppier your presentation is, and more bored your audience gets. I'd prefer 10 slides for a 45 minute talk, because then you have some time for Q&A, but 13 is doable, because you go faster over your title slide, intro slide, and thank you slide.
If this guy is winning "best presenter" awards, then I shudder at how low the standards have become.
More tricks... (Score:3, Interesting)
I could have wanted more "physical appearence" tricks, but it seems to deal mostly with putting slides together. If you are making presentations often, you (hopefully) are aware of how you react in such situations, but if you, like me, give perhaps one presentation every third year you might find these few tricks handy. I know they work for me.
Re:OT: Slashdotting your content providers (Score:3, Interesting)
As I said in my comment, the live demos were cool and more useful than static ones. What do you suggest I do? Always remove useful stuff like this just incase the entire of slashdot pops by uninvited?