Kevin Hoyt

Portland, Oregon is easily one of my favorite cities to visit, so I’m sure you can guess how quickly I responded when the opportunity to present at WebVisions landed in my inbox. Really, I should thank Ryan Stewart for having a conflicting visit to China, but that’s another story. WebVisions for me was a great conference with wonderfully compelling topics being delivered by top notch speakers. In addition to my presentation on the convergence of the web and the desktop (audio), I attended and recorded five other sessions, for which my notes and audio recordings follow.

Note: I made these recordings using my iRiver U10, which on top of having a great Flash-based user interface, does an amazingly good job as doubling as an audio recording device. While in many cases I was able to work with the presenter to get the U10 on the lectern itself, there are two presentations I recorded from my seat which don’t have the same quality. All the audio has had some fashion of limited post-processing using Adobe Soundbooth.

Blogging for a Living: Taking Your Skills to the Next Level
Overcome Death by PowerPoint
User Experience Best Practices
Tagging: Emerging Trends and Techniques
So You Want to Run a Startup

Blogging for a Living: Taking Your Skills to the Next Level (audio)

Speaker: Jim Turner

Description:

Blogging has been a new phenomena and companies and businesses are now looking to make this a part of their marketing, advertising and public relations plans. Bloggers are now taking their newly learned skills and translating that into a career. The skills of a blogger, like basic knowledge of blog design and development, analytics, copywriting and other facets are making it possible to earn a living as a professional blogger.

Notes:

Blogging is critical to evangelism, and I use some very high-level metrics with my own team. Blogging as a business has also always been a fascinating subject to me, so I found the content particularly compelling. I took more notes on this session than any of the others for that reason. If I had to provide one key message I took away from the presentation however, it would have to be that Adobe’s executives should be more actively involved in blogging and social media themselves.

Jim starts with coverage of the different types of companies that use blogging, and how/why they use the technology. From there he moves into job descriptions for people who benefit professionally from blogging. Me and my team fall squarely into this category, and I enjoyed his attempt to classify the roles. Jim closes with a nod to the cost of not blogging, and then what one might expect to have to deliver as a blogging effort.

There’s no doubt to me that blogging matters. Much like having a web presence used to be a major differentiator, blogging is the new difference. Jim uses a great analogy to get this point across. Essentially, people are going to say things about you. You can choose to get involved with the conversation, or ignore it at your peril. The analogy then is that you can’t take pee out of a pool. You can add better pee, but you can’t remove it. It’s a classic analogy I look forward to using in my own presentations eventually.

Overcoming Death by PowerPoint (audio)

Speaker: Dave Yewman

Description:

It’s often called Death by PowerPoint. It’s also known as Show Up and Throw Up. You know who they are; slide slaves who can’t speak without a cascade of bullet-ridden, text-heavy, animated PowerPoint slides. It’s not pretty, but it is preventable. Dave Yewman is a presentation coach who cringes at the sight of CEOs and senior executives trying to deliver good presentations based on bad slides. This session will offer five easy tips for preventing “Death by PowerPoint” and more importantly it will help everyone get to the point and deliver a clear, concise, compelling message - with or without slides.

Notes:

As a regular presenter, I’m always trying to keep an edge on my content and my personal style. I generally feel very comfortable and relaxed in front of an audience, and I think that comes across in my style. Over the years I’ve also evolved the way my slides present the information I want to convey. I rarely use bullets these days, and generally consider my content very Tufte-esque. That being said, there’s always room from improvement, so I took this opportunity get the latest from a professional coach.

Among my favorite quotes from the session was that “more slides do not equal clarity of message” which I something I agree with completely. Another sound bite was a takeaway from Guy Kawasaki of “ten slides, twenty minutes, using only thirty-point font type.”

The session also covered five great tips for making your presentations a success which include: the words are your headline, tell stories instead of reading the slide, hide content slides for later viewing, user presenter mode to view your notes while the audience views your slides, know the shortcuts for your presentation software, and to have your slides printed a thumbnails for quick access. There’s clearly a lot more content there than I’m conveying, so I encourage you to listen to the session and get the full story.

I had a few personal action items from the session. The first was to get a real slide remote. A slide remote with a laser pointer, makes the presentation so much smoother from a presentation perspective. Each time you need to advance, just hit a button. You also don’t have to point at a giant screen, but rather can simply use a laser. I also learned a lot about having a back-up, and recording non-slide portions of your presentation. This is something I’ve personally seen Andre Charland from Nitobi do on more than one occassion, and I’m going to try and make it a personal best practice.

User Experience Best Practices (audio)

Speaker: Nick Finck

Description:

Nick will explore the best practices of user experience by reviewing some of the most popular and highly trafficked websites today such as eBay, Amazon, Toyota, Flickr, Twitter, Netflix and more. Nick will identify and explain both good an bad experiences on these sites on the merits of visual design, information architecture, interaction, and ease of use. If there is time we will open the floor for audience submissions and to provide quick feedback and areas of improvement.

Notes:

This session started by presenting a number of design philosophies. The first one was called the “Golden Triangle” which emphasizes finding the balance between business constraints, user needs and technical requirements. The bulk of the session was then spent applying these concepts as they applied to a number of different web sites ranging from large corporate entities to social networking. The criteria looked at for each site included usability, intuitiveness, structure (information architecture), and visual presentation (design).

You might expect that each site was chosen because it was a disaster. In reality, the presentation spent an equal balance identifying both the good and bad, which I really enjoyed. Some general trends did emerge however with focus on over analyzing analytics, navigation fly-outs, filtering of a large number of categories, and accessing detail information. There’s of course some random Flash-bashing as well, which I find to actually be a side-effect of misinformation.

There’s a lot of good information in the presentation itself, though I’m not sure just how well that will come across in an audio recording. It’s near the end of the presentation, maybe even into the question and answer session, that “coffee cup testing” comes up. The idea is that you can go to a coffee shop, buy random people a coffee for $5 and have them use your application in turn. Just sit back and watch, and you’ve got a pretty effective baseline for general usability and the balancing of the Golden Triangle.

Tagging: Emerging Trends and Techniques (audio)

Speaker: Gene Smith

Description:

Tagging has been the subject of much discussion over the last several years, including presentations at WebVisions ‘06. But recent trends show that tagging is evolving quickly, and that today’s conventional wisdom might not be accurate for long. This session will explore five counterintuitive tagging trends that provide a glimpse into the next generation of user-generated classification.

Notes:

I need to admit up front that I never knew there was so much detail and thought put into tagging. I’ve used tagging on a few projects, and I use it on a lot of my content, but clearly never realized just how deep the subject goes. In fact, this presentation started with a history of tagging, going back to the Dewey Decimal system as the real innovator in this space. While other means have emerged over the years, they’ve not really moved beyond the same core concept.

As we hit an era of “information explosion” however, new ways to deal with tags are being explored, and some of them result in amazing efficiency. The goal is ultimately to balance the bi-directional exchange of this information between the user, the resource being tagged, and the tags themselves. This is really where the exploration in the session begins, and about where I get lost. Still it was really fun to go so deep on what seems like such a simply topic.

Some of the emerging trends and technologies in tagging are covered very well. This includes sticky tags (Wesabe), grooming of tags, “evergreen” categories, machine tags (as introduced by Flickr), OS-level tags, and standards. There’s an interesting discussion at the end about the learnability of an information classification system, and why some people use tags, while others prefer folders, and others do better with search. If you want to learn more about tagging, but not necessarily how to implement it, this is a great session.

So You Want to Run a Startup (audio)

Speaker: Rashmi Sinha

Description:

Ten lessons from running a social Web site.Rashmi will talk about her experiences building and running SlideShare. Including the launch and how to prepare for your own. When to pay attention to the community, when not to. How to live and die by metrics. And how to deal with scaling issues - not about scaling the backend, but the design, the community, the team. This talk should be useful for anyone thinking of building products and working in a startup atmosphere.

Notes:

It’s funny how things come full circle. In the session on “death by PowerPoint” we’re introduced to Guy Kawasaki’s ten-slide mantra. This session is led by somebody involved in a startup in which Guy is an investor. The session then accordingly is presented in ten points. While I think these points are valuable, they are clearly targeted at a social media start-up and I don’t think apply universally to other types of start-ups.

Make your application useful by solving one problem really well.

Speed to market is critical and requires a small, fast and flexible team.

Know what you want to build, build it for the right reason, and watch out for feature creep.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s execution that really matters.

Understand the market size and revenue model, with emphasis on options before venture capital.

Realize you don’t know everything and get angel investors and advisors.

Outsource what you can from infrastructure (Amazon EC2) to ad revenue (Google).

Leverage technology that enables remote workers, with an emphasis on SCRUM.

If execution is everything, then how you launch is putting the key in the ignition.

Once you’re out the door, collect metrics on everything to understand the next step.

I thought this presentation was interesting mostly because the presenter comes from Slide Share, and make several allusions to Macromedia Breeze/Adobe Presenter. I found listening to how she presented the differences in the products, almost as beneficial as the session itself. Many of the facts she used seemed to point to old licensing/purchasing options, which was an interesting spin, so if you haven’t looked at these products recently, it might be worth a fresh look.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.