The Architect Strategy Team here at Microsoft has suddenly gone gung ho over a new presentation style called "Beyond Bullet Points" from Cliff Atkinson (here's one by Ron for example). Having looked through a few presentations in this style and also watched Dick Hardt's totally amazing Identity 2.0 talk at Etech I felt that it was time to snazz up my presentations.

I started off by adding some graphics to my present decks and simplifying the text but it still didn't give the sort of amazing effect that Dicks has. I then added after each slide a demo of what I was trying to convey on the slide which was better. The list of web sites is as follows:

 

History

IBM Mainframes

IBM PC

FTP

Mosaic

Barnes and Noble

Wikipedia

Flickr Home page

Wordpress Home page

Skype

Business

Million Dollar Homepage

Zillow

Adsense

Mechanical Turk

Amazon

Social

Myspaces

Live

You tube

Slashdot

Flickr spell

Technical

Live Maps

Live Drive

Technology

IE7 newsreader

Wiki

IM

IM bots

Gadgets

Blogs

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Meme Map

Amazon

Red Vs Blue

Programmable Web

Relationship Management

Laws of Identity Management

My Ebay

Rich content

Tahoe apprentice

Sleepless in Seattle remix

Collaboration

Company Commander

Discovery

Google Homepage

Flickr Tag Clouds

Delicious

 

So what I did in Mexico was select some sites from this list as I was going along. This seemed to work but I think I would prefer to just do the demos and not do the slides however this may mean that the audience may miss the point I am trying to make. Finally I came up with the idea of doing the demo and then having one slide with the point I am making on that slide in the same way that the movie trailers work.

I could then video the complete session using camtasia and even add music to make it a really punchy and interesting talk.

At the end of the day people wont remember your talk if its boring and the movie industry certainly knows how to make things entertaining. As always I am happy to learn from the experts. Now the question is where can I try it out on a real live audience?