On one side, we had some excellent presentations, like two of the keynote speeches: John Riedl's "Altruism, Slefishness and Destructiveness on the Social Web" and Jan Borchers' "Sweet Spots and Baroque Technologies", which were extremely interesting and they kept us wanting more and more.
On the other side, once again we find the majority of presentations, which..yes you guessed it right...they were BORING!
While constantly looking for ways to stay awake, like playing with my iPhone or checking out up-coming cinema movies, i was wondering: "How is it possible, these people to be SO bad in presenting when their work was (most of the time) worth listening and taking into account?"
Well i watched so many of them, and got sooo bored, which resulted in writing this post to express.... my 5 golden rules for a boring presentation:
1) Overload your slides with more information than the audience can digest: It may be hard, but keep adding stuff to your slides until you have covered the whole area of the slide. If you are using pictures, make sure to be small enough so people sitting at the back of the room will not be able to see them. That will also allow you to add more text on the slides!
2) Read word-by-word the content of your slides: Yes that's right. All you have to do is read everything that is on your slides. Don't care if the audience can read it by themselves. I am sure they will fully understand it if you spoon-feed the content to them.
3) Don’t be exciting about what you are presenting: Your mission is to trick your audience into falling asleep while listening to you. Be prepared, that some of them would have slept well on the night before so you may need to give your best if you want to achieve this. But don't worry, the majority of the audience would propably had some drinks during the previous day's excursion and they will not put a fight for staying awake.
4) Talking about your work is better than demonstrating it: Who cares about demos or examples of your work? Talking about it is much better. Demos will drive the audience crazy where listening to you is much more fascinating. If you up for it, try avoiding commas or even full stops. Keep it flowing non-stop, and try to combine it with the 3rd goal for even better results.
5) Assume your audience knows what you are talking about: Assume your work is self-explanatory and simple for everyone to understand! If they don't know your work or if they don't get it, it's their fault! Do not assume, the audience needs guidance and do not put yourself in their shoes. If you understand what you are talking about, that means they get it too.
To conclude on a more serious note, i would like to refer to Dr Dave Millard's seminar "The New Web Literacy" as an example of someone who did NOT follow any of my golden rules, resulting in a failed attempt to deliver a boring presentation...I encourage you to go and have a look. Trust me you will not regret it!
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