Hacker Friendly

Last night I went to another fantastic Ignite Seattle event. This time, the maker challenge was to make paper airplanes and throw them through a hula hoop from a good distance away. There were some innovative designs, but it seemed like the traditional long dart model did the best.

Actually, I was too busy schmoozing to really pay attention to the airplane shenanigans. Speaking of attention, I met Linda “continuous partial attention” Stone and reconnected with long lost friends and colleagues. The best conversations are always in the halls, regardless of the actual event.

Also speaking of attention, I saw the best Power Point presentation ever made. The “Ask Later” talks at Ignite are all five minutes long: speakers have twenty slides, and the slide is changed automatically every fifteen seconds. Some speakers (like Mark Novak in his hilarious OpenID talk) attempt to cram as much information as possible into each slide. But Scott Berkun took a different approach. His slideshow consisted of twenty boxes, one of which would slowly fade out every fifteen seconds. At a glance, he could tell how much time he had left, and people could concentrate on what he was saying, rather than gawk at the standard projected bullet points. He received thunderous applause and many congratulations.

All of which led to this hilarious conversation on the walk home between me and four other attendees.

Person 1: “I loved that fadey-box Power Point show.”

Everybody: “Yeah!” “Right on!” “That was awesome!”

Person 2: “That was the best Power Point evar.”

Me: “Um, what was his talk actually about?

…silence…

Person 1: “He told five stories…”

Me: “About Sex.”

Everybody: “Oh, right.” “Yeah…” “Ha ha.”

Me: “…and about PAYING ATTENTION.”

So maybe it wasn’t the most effective slideshow ever made, but somehow we all liked it the most.

Once again, I’m looking forward to the next edition of Ignite Seattle.

(Excellent photos by Ted Leung, mediocre hoop photo by me and my camera phone.)