“Many have asked me about my Keynote (it is not PowerPoint) presentation style. I honestly don’t have much to say about it, as I’ve not thought it through. But Chris Tunnell, a researcher on the SNO neutrino physics experiment has, and he sent me his thoughts about how and why (and whether) the style works based on his own experience using it for physics presentations. Read about it in the extended entry.”

“I’m in the middle of preparing my presentation for Highland Fling and I find myself wondering if there’s a logo somewhere I can use on my first slide to tell the world that my presentation does not contain any bullet points.

I Google it. I find nothing. So I make one.

So I present to you the super-duper official No Bullet Points campaign/logo/badge.”

“Are you a visual thinker? Do you want to hone your visual thinking skills? Do you want to learn from some of the best in our industry? Then the Visual Thinking Workshop is for you! VizThink is offering a series of one-day workshops all around the United States. These workshops will help you improve your visual thinking skills. The first workshop series will be run by Dave Gray and Karl Gude.

Apparently separated at birth, together they will show you how to visualize your ideas so you can think and communicate with greater clarity and effectiveness. Working individually and in small teams, you will learn and practice visualization techniques that have been successfully used to improve innovation and accelerate change at some of the world’s leading companies. After completing this workshop you will have a toolkit for thinking and presentation effectiveness — your presentations of complex information and strategies will never be the same.”

“A simple drawing can communicate complex ideas quickly and almost effortlessly. It can even be the basis of a successful business plan.”

“It’s the calm before the presentation storm. Over the next three months, I’ve got four different presentations at Webstock and SXSW. I’m also the best man at a wedding in Washington, all of which means I’m spending most of my down-time thinking up things I’m going to say in the future.”

“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.”

“Bringing together leaders in visual thinking for the first time in one location, the VizThink ‘08 Conference (http://www.vizthink.com) is an opportunity for executives to understand ways of incorporating visualization processes into business, learning and communications strategies to gain faster and more effective results. Hosted by Portland, Ore. based VizThink LLC, the conference will include breakout sessions and forums facilitated by some of the most recognized names in the visual thinking space, including the distinguished Bob Horn from Stanford University, renowned author and artist Scott McCloud, award winning designer Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, most notably known for her work in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and Nigel Holmes formerly with Time magazine. The conference will be held at the Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel from January 27-29. Registration (http://www.vizthink.com/reg.html) is open now.”

“I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and was inspired to get it done by Merlin Mann’s recent piece about improving his use of PowerPoint.

I do a lot of presentations. Each time I give a talk, I try to improve on something. I have a good base on which to build thanks to an unlikely education. Despite my career in technology, I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Theatre.

I learned a lot of good public speaking practices from theatre school. They come in two flavours–content and technique…”

“Gareth introduced me to a brilliant little book called The Plenitude and I started devouring it last night. Excellent stuff, nice discussion of the problems and delights of creating ’stuff’. This little thought popped up in the intro: PowerPoint is a Toy for Thought. And it crystalised all sorts of stuff for me.”

“A few weeks ago, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, John Mackey, gave a presentation called ‘Past, Present, and Future of Food’ for an audience of 2000 in Berkeley, California… Essentially, John Mackey was there to make a presentation and have a conversation that would persuade Michael Pollan (who was critical of Whole Foods in his bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and a skeptical Berkeley audience that his large company still has the credibility to lead the food movement into the future. Mackey gave a 45-minute talk ‘aided’ by 67 text-filled slides followed by an on-stage conversation with the host Michael Pollan. Most people felt that the evening generally was successful given Mackey’s sincerity, honesty, and general likeability, but John Mackey’s ‘multimedia presentation’ as it was billed, could have been so much more.”

“A short guide to what works and what doesn’t when talking to reporters.”

“I just got back from the Economics of Social Media conference put on by Rafat Ali, Staci Kramer, and the rest of the PaidContent crew and it was really an excellent event… The only awful thing about EconSM though — as is the case with most conferences — was the design of the conference badges. While talking to Andy Sternberg of LAist, at one point I interrupted him and said: ‘You know super-complicated innovation would double the amount of socializing going on in this lobby? Double the size of the badges. I can’t frickin’ see anyone’s name.’ Andy agreed.”

“The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books. Through the program, we invite authors to our Mountain View headquarters as well as our New York, Santa Monica, and Ann Arbor offices, where they treat Googlers to readings of everything from serious literature and political analysis to pioneering science fiction and moving personal memoirs; past participants have ranged from novelist Martin Amis and Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz to primatologist Jane Goodall and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton. When possible, we share these remarkable conversations with the world outside the Googleplex via Google Video and YouTube.”

“Research at the University of NSW, Sydney, Australia, claims the human brain processes & retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time… ‘It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind & decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.’”

“Steve Jobs’ blockbuster keynote at last week’s Macworld was brilliantly and powerfully delivered — one of his best ever. It was also a colossal mistake.”