Bad Presentations

This is my little rant about bad presentations, inspired by a link about “The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint” link I saw on digg. Now, I don’t claim to be a perfect presenter, or even a very good one, but I like to think that I give a reasonable presentation.

The “10/20/30 rule” that Kawasaki puts forward is that your presentation should have no more than 10 slides, last no longer than 20 minutes, and use no smaller than a 30pt font. I think these are pretty good guidelines, so long as one remembers that rules are meant to be broken.

The 30pt font rule is very important for pretty much everything. I’ve seen far too many presentations that have so much text crammed onto one slide that you can’t digest (or even read) it. What generally happens in these presentations is that the presenter stands up and reads that text to the audience–that’s not the point of having a slide, the key point should be up there and the presenter should explain it. The only reasonable exception to this is if there’s text that’s not meant to be read during the presentation (i.e. references, etc.).

The 10 slides and 20 minutes are points that are more open to

interpretation. I think that they are a good guideline for the type of presentation that Kawasaki was talking about (a pitch to VCs) and most presentations in general. He says that people will only remember 10 key points in a meeting and I think that's a pretty fair assessment, for that kind of presentation. On the other hand, the majority of presentations I've had the opportunity to give have been fairly technical ones, with a pretty specific audience. The presentations we schedule for the St. John's Linux Users Group are generally either 90 or 45 minutes (including question and possibly demonstration time), that's a pretty far cry from his 20 minutes, but it can be made to work.

I think for a longer presentation the ratio of slides to minutes is very important. If you're spending less than two minutes on a slide, you're either going too fast or the slide isn't important enough. If you are not at least 95% sure how long it'll take to give your presentation, practice it. Personally, I can judge how long I'll take to give my presentations, and can make them fit nicely into the timeslot so I don't generally practice presentations. I've seen too many presentations that have enough content to fill an hour that have been crammed into fifteen minutes. This makes it look like the presenter is not properly prepared, and can be uninteresting for the audience.

The other part of the longer presentation is that it's hard to keep the attention of your audience. If it's just slides and talking I think that you have to keep the talk under an hour and keep the rest of the time for questions and discussion. If the presentation has interesting demonstrations, I think you can get away with being somewhat longer, because the demonstrations will break it up and keep people interested. The other thing that longer presentations need is an overview slide at the beginning, as well as a summary at the end. The overview will act as a map for both the presenter and the audience, knowing that you don't plan on talking about one little thing the entire time can help keep the audience from drifting off. The summary should bring back all the key points from the whole presentation, i.e. 'If you remember 3 things from this presentation, these should be it:...'.

Now that we've covered 'the 10/20/30 rule' time for a few of my own suggestions. Lose the transition effects, they're pointless and nobody is impressed. Don't use a theme that came with Powerpoint, either make your own (remember to keep it readable) or use regular text on a background. This is more important when your presentation will be grouped with others, such as students presenting to a class; you'll stand out more with black text on a white background than those themes (not to mention that many of the included themes are ugly).

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White space is not “stealing our bandwidth”

I just read yet another article about how extra white space in HTML code is wasting bandwidth. I have several issues with these articles, the first of which is that people actually believe them.

Here are what I think are the main issues:

1. Most large sites use HTTP Compression. This means that for all text files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) the server is compressing the file before sending it “down the wire”, where your browser will decompress it. GZip is a respectable compressor and will remove almost all redundancies in these files.
2. Even if there wasn’t any compression, that whitespace is useful for debugging and then for updates/upgrades, etc. You wouldn’t write all your C/C++/Java code with no extra spaces/newlines because the compile time would be a few milliseconds faster, would you? No, because it would get too difficult to update the file properly.
3. The articles always ignore the benefits of your browser cache. Sure Google’s logo image could be more compressed by making it a PNG, but chances are that people who use Google (is there anybody online who doesn’t?) use it multiple times a day, the cache means you likely only download that image once. There are also issues with PNGs and some browsers, for instance older versions of Opera and pre-Tiger Safari will attempt to adjust the colour of PNG files if there is no colourspace info embedded (which would enlarge the file as well). Someone like Google wouldn’t want the colours of their logo changed on certain browsers.
4. The argument for using CSS shorthands is somewhat debatable, so feel free to ignore this point. They will make the file smaller (before and after compression), and don’t signifigantly decrease readability. I don’t generally use them because I tend to be more explicit when writing CSS rules. The other reason is that I don’t trust them–getting the same set of CSS rules to work across all browsers is tricky enough without using shorthands.

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Green Party spamming blogs

Last night it seems that Stephen Eli Harris (the Green Party candidate for St. John’s East in the coming federal election) toured around any Newfoundland blogs he could find (including this one), leaving comments and links to his own political blog. We’ve checked the logs for a few of our interconnected sites and it seems he’s visited them all, but only left comments on sites that explicitly state that the owner lives in Newfoundland.

I can only assume that this was an attempt to drive traffic to his site, and maybe to increase his ranking on some of the search engines. (Not going to work on here, Wordpress is smart enough to put rel="nofollow" on all links in comments, so the robots ignore them–I’m doing the same thing on his link in this post.)

Now, as a rule, I’m not a political person. I don’t generally talk politics with people, mostly because I’m not that interested–unless something happens that catches my interest. I’m going to make an exception here and state that I don’t approve of Mr. Harris’ actions, and unless I hear otherwise, I’m permanently making the connection between the Green Party and spam in my head.

You can read more about Mr. Harris’ tactics on Brian’s post ‘Spammed by the Green Party’.

(This post is going without a song quote, because spammers don’t deserve one.)

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Satanic Inferences?

I was just browsing Digg, and I saw this story about a 80’s D&D cartoon, which is not very interesting by itself (at least not to me, I don’t remember the series at all). What was more interesting is that the series was pulled for “satanic inferences” and when I went to the page, it showed with 666 diggs. I had to post it for others to see.

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Visual Upgrades

As you or may not notice as you’re reading this, I’ve made a few minor updates to the style of this site. I wanted to give the site a little more style, pizzazz, panache, and might I even dare to suggest cachet? (Oh, it’s got cachet, baby! It’s got cachet up the yin-yang!)

Now, as a warning, if you happen to be using IE the page might look slightly worse than before–the round corners will be far less smooth than they should be. The solution to this is proper PNG transparency support (look to any other current brower, or wait for IE 7)

The first of the updates was the banner image up top. It looks much like it did when there was no image, but it has some background texture now (an image of a hard drive, from stock.xchng).

The other update was a slight gradient in all the other blue boxes. Barely noticible in a short post, but in a longer one you can see how it darkens as you move down the page. This gradient is why I had to change how I did my corners, they used to be 100% opaque images with both the blue and grey. Now, because I don’t know which shade of blue will be at the bottom of a post, they only contain the grey and the rest is transparent. In sensible browsers the PNG alpha transparency works great, but in IE I had to fall back to the binary transparency of a GIF. And before somebody trys to inform me of the AlphaImageLoader workaround to getting transparency to work in IE, I’ve already tried it. It fails when you have to use background-position, but was otherwise working OK.

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Welcome to 2006

Well, 2005 is now gone, over, finished. Although I’m not the type to make resolutions (I’d have dropped them by mid-January anyways) I do generally take this time to look back over the previous year and see what (if anything) I’ve accomplished.

In 2005, perhaps the biggest life-changing event for me was that I left my job, and went back to school. (Which is interesting because in 2004 I left school and got a job.) I wrote and released XFN Graph, which generated some interest with a few bloggers. I got more involved with the local IEEE section, including being on the planning committee for an international conference. I was headhunted by Google and took a trip to California for a job interview.

So, it looks like 2005 was somewhat eventful… Bring on 2006!

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