Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Argh, I hate reading slides without the accompanying audio/video, because I feel like I miss out on 90% of the context.

What are you referring to? This is a blog post and the talk that she refers to in the first paragraph has full audio/video available here: http://jsconf.eu/2010/speaker/the_jquery_divide_by_rebecca_m...

Hope that helps your hate.

To be fair, she doesn't link it from the blog post.

Awesome - thank you, I'll watch that.

As a speaker, let me just say that I have yet to figure out how to handle this. When I'm presenting, I want people listening to me, not reading the slides. When people are consuming the slides online afterwards, they can quickly get misconstrued without the context of my spoken words. All of that said, I'll add a link to the video from the blog post :)

The only good way I have seen it handled without a lot of duplication or extra work is to have the speaker's own notes as a handout, and the presentation just for the audience. Of course that takes a little planning up front.

Good talk, watched it a few weeks ago, still trying to work out how to solve dependancies on my application in an extensible easy to hand over to other devs way.

I have come to the conclusion that communicators must present to different audiences in different formats. Slides used in public speaking are no different from hand gestures. Slides posted online for the same speech have to be touched up or completely redone for the new online audience. The audience who heard my speech might benefit from having a copy of my slides as memory cues.

Consider, then, not referring to your slides as expository material. Instead, add paragraphs to further develop the discussion.

I think you've got it backwards, at least when it comes to good talks. It's always seemed to me that at least 80% of the important content is usually discernible from the slides (especially since you can probably infer the other things that the speaker was talking about, minus stuff like stories and jokes which are usually fluff anyways).

I don't really have it backwards - I'm just describing my experience. :/

I also always heard that slides are supposed to be guideposts to a presentation, not the main point of one.

I was too; that's why I said "I think". I've heard that too, but it nearly always seems like the "good bits" get put in the slides while a lot of the other things that the speakers say I could have done without. Of course, the rest of the stuff is often interesting, just not usually nearly as useful.

I also always heard that slides are supposed to be guideposts to a presentation, not the main point of one.

I've increasingly been viewing slides as a means to get people to just look up from their keyboard or phone and stop twittering or chatting for at least a minute or two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com