Bulletware

December 28, 2004

In preparation for next year's ambitious speaking schedule with a new stable of talks, I'm retooling. Keynote, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle are my new presentation tools of choice.

Equipped with those tools, I can quickly crank out cool presentations. I start by outlining my talk in OmniOutliner and then export the outline to a Keynote presentation. Then I emphasize certain talking points with diagrams created in OmniGraffle. And finally I polish up the master slide templates with color and style to make all the slides look uniform with an animated slide transition between each. Yes, I'm very productive with these tools and happy to have learned something new to start the new year.

There's just one problem: The resulting bulletware isn't the content of my presentation. If it were, I could avoid a lot of travel by just letting you download the bits. But the content of my presentation doesn't fit on a bulleted line, nor in a diagram, nor on an endless stream of slides with bullets and diagrams. No, you and I are the content of my presentation. It's a unique and personal conversation that can't be duplicated by firing up a projector at another time and location. The slides are merely canned visual aids for one possible conversation.

So in addition to retooling for next year, I'm also rethinking how to put bulletware in its rightful place. Bullet lists work well to convey certain types of information, but I'm making a concious effort to not reach for them first. I'm drawing inspiration from the following sources, echoed across blogspace many times over by now, but organized for your groking convenience in, er, a bulleted list:

I look forward to having a conversation with you next year!

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