kick-butt presentations... radical approaches

We end up nowadays having to communicate publicly quite often (at school, at home, and even raising issues of common interest to friends and family). Most of those cases do call for how to deliver the message well in a limited amount of time.

Then most people gravitate to overusing Microsoft's powerpoint in a couple of areas: visual clutter and sheer number of slides.

I wanted to share a couple of pointers to content on the web about effective presentations that I find worth considering.

1. the anything but powerpoint approach. Have you wondered how historical speeches might have been if the powerpoint plague was around at the time? in particular.. how the temptation to abuse the tools can damage the message? have a look at the Gettysburg address by Peter Norvig, and don't miss "the making of"

2. the don't-you-dare-to-blink style (aka. the Lessig Method of presentation). What I like about this type of presentation is how it debunks the myth of the "slides budget" and simplistic rules-of-thumb suggesting 2 minutes per slide or so. It clearly calls for a proper rehearsal (since timing is everything), but it boasts an amazing visual simplicity. Here it goes in 2 versions, the first one on Larry Lessig's speech of Free culture and the second one on less earth-shaking topic by Dick Hardt at OSCON 2005.

I found those cases thought-provoking, especially given the thousands of hours that most of all have to leave just feeling that somebody is pushing powerpoint slides down our throat without much previous analysis. Sure there are more effective ways of communicating