And because the table is from the Visual Literacy group, it’s well laid out visually. Colour coding quickly tells you if an element is useful for visually communicating a metaphor or displaying data or laying out a strategy, while symbols indicate how much and what kind of detail is offered in the examples. Brilliant!

Slides and multimedia are there to enhance your information. If everything you have to say is up there on the screen, then you might as well email everyone the presentation as a file or send them a PDF of the slides.

The other danger in becoming a mere narrator is that, unless you’re a very powerful and persuasive reader, you’re bound to be less lively and less passionate because you’re focused on reading the words and not on communicating and connecting with the audience.

Whenever I suggest that my clients simplify their message or simplify their visual aids, what I’m really saying is: stop spamming your audience’s brains, because not only is spam annoying, but we have filters to keep it out or, if it gets in, we trash it. Most importantly, spam distracts us from the useful and interesting things trying to get to our ‘mental inbox.’

Say no to attention spam!

UPDATE: Seems I’m behind the times – found ‘attention spam’ in the Urban Dictionary. The closest definition to my concept: “Any material or fodder which tends to destroy the attention span.”

Thanks to Presentation Revolution for the reference.

I’ve also been playing with a new Flash presentation creator called Flypaper – I love their tag line “stories that stick.” I’ll be looking at that in more detail soon (though it IS summer and…)

As a confirmed “slide minimalist” I was curious about Oracle’s experiment and did a bit of digging. Turns out that, while the zone was free of slides, it was certainly not free of visual communications in other forms. Here’s the description on one blog:

…the No Slide Zone track prohibited the use of projected “slideware” decks, instead encouraging presenters to engage in creative and interactive presentation formats.

Sessions included a Jeopardy spoof focused on database security, a caged death match between old school and new school database admins, a content management cook-off, and a mad scientist laboratory cooking up “Enterprise 2.0” experiments.

I think interactivity along these lines has a place in some presentations, but it seems to me that in the absence of slides, people had to substitute other forms of visual stimulation. Anyone ready to try an “Only Speaking” presentation zone? Now that’s a Luddite .

Now of course you could load up your presentation materials on a place like SlideShare and get feedback, but what I like about Elluminate is that it’s live, with audio and video, so you can get immediate feedback and even try changing things in real time. Then there’s the application sharing, the desktop display functions, and lots more.

Best of all, there’s a simple version of the system which is free, allowing up to three people to join you for a mini-roundtable.