Waterfall Web

I was at a meeting recently where a teacher gave a presentation about some stuff the school was involved in. And, of course, she used Powerpoint.

Very badly.

I’m sure you have all seen it. Several paragraphs of text per slide. Cheesy animations (and different animations for each block of text). The “handouts” get handed to you as the presentation commences, so you and up reading the handouts during the presentation. And then you feel a little guilty, so you start listening to the presentation, only to find it contains exactly what’s on the handouts anyway – nothing more.

Yikes – if this is what teachers do then I’m really sorry for my kids.

It reminded my of an eBook by Seth Godin called Really Bad Powerpoint. (Links to a PDF file.) Well worth a read if you ever have to give a presentation.

And then today I read a comparison between the presentation styles of Uncle Steve and Uncle Bill. (Jobs and Gates if you’re not sure.) Which reminded me of Seth’s eBook again – especially if you look at the comparisons between the 2 sets of slides used in the example.

Now, I know public speaking is hard – and I’m trying not to be too critical of the teacher here. But please! Put some more thought into your presentations!!!

Microsoft to buy Yahoo? So reports the Sydney Morning Herald:

Yahoo would plug a “strategic hole” at Microsoft that was not filled by the purchase of AQuantive, announced last week, Mr Noto [a Goldman Sachs analyst] wrote in a note to clients.

AQuantive, which creates web ads and measures whether they reach the target audience, does not give Microsoft the roughly half a million advertisers required to compete against Google, Mr Noto said.

Windows Live Search obviously isn’t being used for search as Microsoft had hoped. But one has to ask: would this be a good thing or a bad thing for Yahoo? And does Google care?

Google updated their Analytics statistics tool during the week – and what a huge improvement. Analytics always offered heaps of data, it was just presented in a very dull way.

You can really see that their purchase of Measure Map, a blog-specific statistics tool, has inspired much of the Analytics overhaul.

Below is the menu from Measure Map on the left, and Google Analytics on the right.

Now, they are obviously different as they serve different purposes, but the revised Analytics layout is much fresher – benefiting from the great work Adaptive Path did with Measure Map.

If you haven’t already, sign up for an Analytics account. It’s amazing what info you can get, and now how easy it is to access! (And have nice reports automatically emailed to you every week!)