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unimpressive

This whole: "Publish the slides without the talk" trend is starting to piss me off.

I'd rather have a 30 minute long mp3 of the talk.

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Me too. That was the plan for this one, but it didn't work out.

Sorry you're pissed.

Mostly it's confusing when advices of the type "do this" and "don't do this" are mixed together. For example, slide 64 and second line of 89 seems to contradict each other, or the "don't be an asshole" but "it's alright to be a dick" one.

Exactly, I'm actually mostly confused by this. At first it seemed like a good talk. I didn't agree with everything, but I don't have to, it was still a good talk... Now having read all, I'm more confused than anything else.

All life advice is like this.

If you made a gigantic list of every piece of unique and actionable life advice you've ever heard or given, you could probably find 30% of them contradicting another 30%.

I am hedging by giving a number as low as 30.

Sounds like you should add another slide. :P

hey, thanks for the slides and the talk, they are stunning.

What tools did you use to create the presentation slides? What fonts are these? How did you decide upon this color scheme?

Check out this post he wrote:

http://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/

That's neat. It still leaves one related question unaswered for me. How would one go about making something like this [1] (but with arbitrary similar changes)?

[1] http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/6721/imagehy.png

I don't mind it too much. Sure we could get all the details from a 30 minute talk video/mp3, but I'm a lot less likely to view/listen to that than I am to read a presentation in big writing that I can read in < 5 minutes, and which I will still probably get the gist from anyway.

I'm the opposite - I find video/audio so inefficient. I get impatient and I can feel my blood pressure rising. :-) Wish there were better ways to skim audio/video. I like the videos/audios with auto-scrolling transcripts but those UIs have a lot of room for improvement.

Depending on the talk, the elocution and delivery can be a valuable part of the work.

I'm with you. Transcripts are golden, but if that's not an option, at least the Stanford MOOCs and Coursera got it right with the ability to increase the playback speed. Most talks lose nothing at 1.5x speed.

Our team is actually working to solve this very problem. Our goal is to make it way easier to skim and find the best parts of videos (and possibly audio later on). It's not visible on our site yet, but we have a really cool 'highlights' feature in the works that lets you quickly watch the key parts of several videos to determine if they're worth your time.

www.vuact.com

Any feedback appreciated!

That's actually really cool. I'd be curious to see how that works with music videos, too. I also wish, however, that videos had summaries of what actually happens that we could skim ahead of time.

I've always wondered what it was with publicizing sheets instead of a talk. 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? When designing new presentations lately, it made me doubt a lot how much text should be on. Even my teachers publish sheets only nowadays, which are good reminders if they ever talked about it, but not good to read only on your own.

A structured article instead of a talk would also be fine. It's quicker than watching a video or listening to the talk and still conveys all the information or perhaps more.

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?

If so, you were taught wrong, IMHO. If I have time to sit through a (decent) talk, the slides don't matter. If I don't, the slides are very important.

Makes sense. It's too bad teachers give lower scores for having too much info on slides that distract them from what the student is saying.

Slide decks are created for different reasons. Some are made to fully contain and communicate ideas then widely circulated - these decks are content. These decks don't need someone to deliver them.

Decks accompanying presentations aren't those slide decks. Presentations are expected to use human communication skills to express more than what you can fit in slides. In school, you give just these kinds of presentations. You aren't asked to create slide decks and circulate them among your colleagues. The slides are not the content. Which is why these slides in particular mostly make no sense alone.

> 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...

http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/04/han...

I thought I got the bulk of the content in less than 4 minutes. I actually preferred this to a video... where the first 4 minutes are frequently just introduction and fluff.

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