The Web of Presentations: a Quick Roundup of Articles

I wanted to share some of the websites, articles, blog posts, videos and slides I’ve been looking at during the last couple of weeks. I really hope you enjoy some of the resources in this post, and if you want to share your own bookmarks feel free to leave a comment below. Thanks!

Denise Graveline shares more than a hundred famous speeches by Women, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Lady Gaga to Sheryl Sandberg to the Queen of England. Besides a transcript, each speech features a commentary on what you can learn from it, plus audio or video whenever available.

After noticing a couple of Tweets regarding the first “German PowerPoint Karaoke Championship” a few weeks ago, I became aware of this crazy game that people seemingly have been doing for a number of years.
It works like this: participants are asked to deliver a presentation based on slides they have never seen before, about often bizarre topics which they have no idea about. Time is usually limited to a few minutes, and either the audience or a jury judges the presenter’s performance. To make matters worse, in some cases slides are auto-advanced every few seconds!

Former Microsoft employee and author Scott Berkun published a nice post called “What I learned from PowerPoint Karaoke”. His advice: there is no way to be good at this 🙂
Scott also posted a checklist about how to prepare for great talks (PDF)

Naturally, a post on great presentations would hardly be complete without mentioning at least one TED talk. Many of you will already know Hans Rosling’s famous talks about humanitarian topics. Rosling, a Swedish professor of global health, uses data from the United Nations and other agencies to create compelling and often surprising presentations. I recently watched “the magic washing machine” where he combines storytelling with interesting facts and analyses.

(Image source: http://de.fotolia.com/id/52179055)