Presentation Zen

(A) Presentation Zen both the book (that came out recently) and the blog: http://www.presentationzen.com/ and
Beyond Bullet Points, http://beyondbulletpoints.com/ the book and online seminars.

Yes, both of them are primarily focused on "static" presentations, however the focus on the telling a good story through your demonstration is the point. In presenting Krugle at DEMO06 (and winning a DEMOGod award, woohoo!), the biggest failing we saw in many of the other presentations was the fact that the "story" was a confusing, convoluted mess.

(B) Spend a lot more time building and practicing your presentations/demonstrations than you think. Video yourself is great if you can do it but just standing up and actually running through the entire presentation/demo repeatedly goes a long ways.

(C) For online/web demos, I always build a completely usable, static presentation (in Keynote/PowerPoint) using lots of e.g., diagrams and screenshots so that the presentation still works for the audience even if the network/server is down/slow.

(D) Have a personality -- and bend it towards your audience. I.e., a presentation needs to be engaging/interesting to the audience. I.e., think at least as much about entertaining (in the best possible way) as you do about being e.g., informative.

(E) Have fun!

Hope this helps,
John

I found the embedded slides didn't work for me, so here's a non-embedded link to the same slides: http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/the-road-to-being-a-kickass-publis-speaker

I'm a big fan of:

(1) encouraging techies to take and make opportunities to present publicly; and,

(2) improving the quality of the presentation in terms of supporting material and presentation styles.

In the past I've found sites like Presentation Zen (http://www.presentationzen.com/) to be really helpful for improving the quality of my presentations.

I'm no Lawrence Lessig but here's part of a presentation I did last year at DEFCON: http://youtube.com/watch?v=XotF9FyiAZc (Self-critique: still need to work on reducing the "ahhs". :) )

Also, like most things, improvement takes time: for many of my earlier presentations I just used a vertically scrolled single HTML page for my "slides"--it did the job and allowed me to concentrate more on the content. Nowadays when I actually manage to finish the content earlier than the night before I can put more time into increasing the production values.

(Incidentally, I think the DEFCON videos from last year are possibly the best layout for post-event videos I've seen with legible slides and decent sized speaker view.)

> I've always wondered what it was with publicizing sheets instead of a talk.

Laziness, mostly. Slides are a printable material and less effort to publish than a transcription or a full article write-up.

> Didn't I get taught in school every year for the past decade that sheets are supposed to support the material I'm talking about and should not say much on their own?

I wasn't aware people were actually teaching decent presentation skills. They certainly weren't while I was pushing for them. But yes, this is correct.

But it's important to recognize that "correct" isn't good enough. If you need to cater to people like CamperBob2 in the sibling comment, you need to structure your existence around his schedule so that he isn't inconvenienced by a desire to know what you want to convey.

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2005/06/using_annotated.html

http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/04/handouts_can_se.html

I think the idea is good, I don't doubt that the content and research may be good, but I do have an issue with someone whose credentials are "During high school and college I've done several presentations".
I consider myself comfortable and relatively good at presenting and I've presented in front of a few thousand professional peers before but I wouldn't for a moment conclude that I am qualified to run an online course on presenting. If you don't have experience trying the tips and techniques you recommend or a wealth of knowledge from observing others use them I'm going to have my doubts.

Please don't get me wrong, I think its a worthy cause and something you can make money off of but to my fellow HN reader, I'd recommend a site like http://www.presentationzen.com/ for advice on presenting. On a side note, one of my favorite presentation guidelines is the TED commandments for anyone who's interested.

My hearing was ACTUALLY permanently damaged when a sticky iron weight fell on a leg press machine at a 24-hour fitness about 5 years ago.

The weights looked like these: http://www.presentationzen.com/.a/6a00d83451b64669e201156eb409b4970c-450wi

One extra weight slab was "stuck" to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned. The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20-30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter.

Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like "static", for lack of a better explanation.

All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky, and if they are near your ear...

> 4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

This one reminds me of writing advice from South Park's Trey Parker: write better stories by figuring out how to replace all your "ands" and "buts" with "therefore".

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2015/05/the-key-to-story-structure-in-two-words-therefore-but.html

> 20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

This one strikes me as an especially great idea! Rewrite something bad to make it good. There are certainly some shows I've bitched about (like a lot of people) but I would have a hard time dissecting it to find what's wrong with it, and even harder time fixing it. Having to do it would certainly be educational.