Thought-provoking article about presentations. Me? I hate PowerPoint. It’s just personal, though.
I’ve sat through maybe three presentations in the last year. Four, possibly. One was done by my own father, Pa Wetzel, so I can take that. His presentation is actually content-filled, but the presentation itself was designed by a buddy’s girlfriend, and the content is different. It doesn’t look, act or feel like PowerPoint.
But the other ones?
There was one, at a SXSW workshop – that got to me. The author’s content was actually quite good. Amazing – now sadly out-of-date – stuff. But having all the material bullet-pointed and shoved into a pre-formatted outliner was annoying. Very.
Actually, this was last Friday’s Five, but there were a couple of the questions I liked. So here’s the “geek speak” history in a nutshell –
The web page was the outgrowth of some work I’d been doing on an astrology presentation. Always trying to stay cutting edge, I’ve lectured, exactly one (1) time in a location where I could hook my laptop up to the overhead display. But being a pioneer at the time, I went ahead and built a presentation, just in case I ever had that chance again.
1993? Someplace in there. I built up a series of slides, complete with artwork, to accentuate the astrology lecture I was starting to do, about once or twice a month, at the various venues I worked.
Simple stuff, nothing too exciting, just Planets, Signs, and Symbols. That presentation never saw the light of day. When I was in Dallas, some time last month, I found printed-up versions of that presentation, in fact, I lifted some of my old material from there, the very words, to plug into the new book, just because I liked it when the material was alive.
“Fishing Guide to the Stars” horoscopes moved from print medium to electronic in 1994. The first host was some back directory at Microsoft, and the scopes were an exercise in programming for an engineer/buddy/friend-of-a-friend. Went live that fall.
The scopes next moved to a local Austin server in June of ’95, and I started updating weekly in July of that year, and I got picked up by AOL/astronet in August, same year. I coded the first of the pages by hand, banging rocks together to make binary code. No but I did do the first pages in a simple text editor – all by hand.
The scopes already had a huge following when I moved everything onto its own server in ’98. shortly after that, I started doing the web journal, too.
It all started with that PP presentation, and one of those editorial comments, “You know, that would make a good web page….”
Like the forthcoming book, “You mean, write it for the web then put it in book? No one’s ever done that before.”
And if I ever get a chance to do a PowerPoint Presentation with bullets? Just shoot me.
