Marin Dimitrov tweeted today:
SlideShare says my content is among the top 1% of most viewed on SlideShare in 2013
Since I am interested in promoting topic maps and SlideShare is a venue for that, I checked the Slideshare summary, looking for clues.
First, Marin hasn’t overloaded SlideShare, some 14 slideshares to date.
Second, none of the slideshares with high ratings are particularly recent (2010).
Third, 19.5 slides per presentation against the average of 14.4.
Fourth, average words per slide, 35.4 compared to average slideshare of 10.
Is that the magic bullet?
We have all been told to avoid “death by powerpoint.”
There is a presentation with that name: Death by PowerPoint (and how to fight it) by Alexei Kapterev. (July 31, 2007)
Great presentation but at slide 40 Alexei says:
People read faster than you speak. This means you are useless.
(written over a solid text background)
How to explain Marin’s high amount of text versus Alexei saying to not have much text?
Marin’s NoSQL Databases, most of the sixty (60) slides are chock full of text. Useful text to be sure but very full of it.
My suspicion is that what works for a presentation to a live audience, were you can fill out the points, explain pictures, etc., isn’t the same thing as a set of slides for readers who didn’t see the floor show.
Readers who didn’t hear the details are likely to find “great” slides for a live presentation to be too sparse to be useful.
So my working theory is that slides for live presentations should be quite different from slides for posting to Slideshare. What can be left for you to ad lib for the live audience should be spelled out on the slides. (my working hypothesis)
Suggestions/comments?
PS: I intend to test this theory with some slides on topic maps at the end of January.