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Wednesday, August 20, 2003 |
From Wired - Interesting thoughts on the impact of "slideware".
Extract:
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.
Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.
4:17:33 PM 
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Excellent Content On RSS Hitting Critical Mass By Dan Gillmor (SiliconValley.com/eJournal)
Extracts:
One fan is Mitchell Kertzman, a friend who has run several Silicon Valley companies and is now a venture capitalist with the firm Hummer Winblad in San Francisco. When he saw an RSS newsreader for the first time, he says, "I had the same instinctive feeling I had years ago when I saw my first primitive Web browser -- a feeling of amazing and unlimited possibilities."
"RSS is evolving as a replacement for e-mail publishing and marketing," he (Chris Pirillo) says. "RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should. Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to you on your terms."
I wish public-relations people would get with the program, too. If they'd only start creating RSS feeds of releases, journalists and the public at large could see the material they want, and the PR industry would be able to stop blasting huge amounts of e-mail to people whose inboxes are already over-cluttered. Of course, there will continue to be a use for e-mail in PR, but the volume could be cut substantially.
1:46:52 PM
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© Copyright 2004 Rob Robinson.
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