Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

the guy asked his cab driver.  The reply, "Practice. Practice. Practice."

That was the punchline to a joke we used tell each other when we were in locking ourselves in a practice room at the conservatory 6-8 hours a day.    But it is also the key to a successful presentation, according to this article from business week.   

The key points:

1.  Master Your Material

"Rehearsing means walking through your presentation exactly as you would when you deliver it -- out loud." 

2.  Practice with a Video Camera

This sounds painful, but you tape yourself and then watch it.  This is how kids studying music school self-assess their peformance.  The article suggests that you evaluate your performance using the following questions:

• Does this person engage me? Do I want to hear more? Is he convincing? Genuine? Passionate?

• How's your energy level?

• Do you get to the point quickly, or do you tend to meander from thought to thought? Is your message clear or convoluted?

• What does your body language say? Do you exude strong, confident, and commanding body language? Are your arms crossed instead of open? Do you fidget, rock, or have other distracting body mannerisms? If so, the videotape will help you identify and eliminate bad habits.

• Do you use comfortable, animated, and natural hand gestures, or do you look stiff and wooden?

• Are there nonsense or filler words that you repeat all the time while you're thinking?

• How do you look? Is your wardrobe disheveled or crisp? Do the colors you wear compliment your skin tone, or do you look washed out? Do you look a little better than the people in your audience?

In a post titled "How To Manage The PowerPoint Presentation Process From Conception to Rehearsal To Handouts"   Ellen Finkelstein, author of How To Do Anything With PowerPoint stresses that "Your PowerPoint file is not your presentation; what you say before an audience is your presentation."   She suggests that you create your slides and then your presentation, expect that you'll find that the logic of your content will lead you to change (and improve) the organization of your slides.

She offers this advice on how your notes page can help you get from concept to rehearsal to handout as follows:

* Write out what you're going to say using the notes pane for each slide
* Print out the notes pages and use it to practice outloud
* After your rehearse, use PowerPoint's narration feature to record yourself
(She explains the process in detail here)
* Use your printed notes page for your notes when you present

Weblog Usability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox this week is called "Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes."   The summary:

Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.

I wonder whether there are "Weblog Usability Points for Web 2.0?"   His points seem geared for "blog as web site."  Of course if an individual blog or blog community intends to reach readers who may be new to blogging and blogosphere, these tips may apply.   I imagine that it might be hard for a newbee to jump into a blog community - as it might be like entering a room where there is a conversation already going on and relationships established and you just don't have that context.   You listen to the conversation and it all sounds like insider jobs that you don't get.

Maybe none of this applies to Web.2.0 since blogs are so Web 1.0 to 1.75?   There are some usability points in this post "Web 2.0 for Designers" from the Digital Web Magazine. 

Emergent Navigation and Relevance: Users are in Control

As a result of the remixing aspects of Web 2.0, most content will be first encountered away from the domain in which it lies. Thus, much of the navigation that is used to reach a specific item might be far removed from the navigation specifically designed for it. This “distributed” navigation might come in the form of a feed reader, a link on a blog, a search engine, or some other content aggregator.

One of the side effects of this is that the sources of and pathways to useful information will continually change, and users won’t necessarily know where to go to find it. Fortunately, content aggregators have a built-in answer for this—they can track what people are doing. By recording what pieces of microcontent are most often visited, aggregators can use past user behavior to predict what users will find most relevant in the future. This is very apparent in Daypop, Del.icio.us, and Blogdex feeds. What people have found relevant in the past is likely to be useful in the future.

With relevance decided within these third-party interfaces, users might even be able to read content without ever visiting the domain it comes from. Navigation schemes, as we know them, will be used less. The most traveled navigation paths will emerge from user behavior instead of being “designed” specifically for it.

Categories: net2, nptech, design

More is Less: Use of Tags As Information Coping Skill

David Weinberger wrote posted this interesting twist about information overload:

The power of tags shows that the way to manage information overload is more information. That's what the doomsayers of the 90's — Information Anxiety! Information Tidal Wave! — didn't foresee.

So, guess he is saying more is less? There was an excellent point in one of the comments from Jon Husband:

It's (the flow) not gonna stop, and the traditional ways information and knowledge have been classified, ordered, made accessible, distributed and stored have had major change visit, as you have pointed out many times. We now need to become, and feel, adept art skimming, dot-connecting, pattern recognition, and deciding well and wisely when to delve more deeply and in more concentrated ways into issue X or issue Y. Actually, as I read the above phrase, I realized tagging addresses rather neatly large parts of these processes pre-hyperlinks and tagging ... "classified, ordered, made accessible and stored", doesn't it ...

Technorati just announced today that there are: One Million Distinct Tags, 14 Million Tagged Posts . The post also provides some tips for automating the use of technorati tags in your post using ecto.

Hmm .. time to really re-think, update my information coping skills curriculum to include how to tag ... maybe it isn't crap. Haven't decided right now.

ZZStructure: Information Design

Zzstructure "is a way of representing the structure of information. It was invented by Ted Nelson and currently being worked on collaboration with hyperstructure group. Zzstructure is very different, for example the concepts of 'file', 'folder' and 'application' are abandoned. Because of this a bit of fantasy, creativity and an ability to forget previous knowledge is needed in order to understand Zzstructure. A Zzstructure structure consists of cells and dimensions. A cell is the basic unit of information of a Zzstructure structure. Cells containing related information can be connected with each other along dimensions, the number of which is unlimited. A Zzstructure structure is separate from its visualisation (= the way the data is presented on the screen), which means that a Zzstructure structure can have many visualisations designed for different purposes. Even though a Zzstructure structure is separate from its visualisation, a Zzstructure structure is not separate from other Zzstructure structures. Every piece of information stored in a digital device using based on Zz! structure is in the same space: the same cells can be connected on several dimensions created for different structures." I wish I could see a visual of this, but nothing on the site.