I pulled out all the Hawaii in yer eye themes for the latest incarnation of my dog and dog show, presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the EDMEDIA 2009 conference (all links mentioned in the show are just a scroll away from that link)
It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference:
Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic?
I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to take a tack of emphasizing some things I suggested were more important than the tools, some things I called “the craft” and aimed to hang them on some of the examples.
- A story must clearly arc to an end, to a “punchline.”
- Distill a story down to only its most necessary elements.
- If you cannot create media, modify or re-purpose.
- Think and tell in metaphors and symbols.
- Be creative within a limited tool set.
- The act of locating media is a key craft
I did get the audience to join in the group story game where they had to contribute to the prompt:
Under a Full Moon, Last Night I Saw The Strangest Thing Happen On Waikiki Beach
(as usual) it involved Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” and then he was dancing with a shark… someone has to wrap that one up.
And also as usualy lots of people want t know what software the presentation was done in.
“That’s the web”
and it is! It’s just images, some RSS, and the CoolIris plugin– all building on what I outlined in CoolIris as a Presentation tool. It’s a bit easier now to run your own image slide shows, even from your desktop, and Scott Leslie keeps pounding at other ways to create shows– but to me, the most powerful method is rolling your own RSS feeds since you can then define the web link for each slide. That is the reason I use CoolIris as it is nearly ideal for doing presentations about web sites because of the way it moves back and forth from presentation to web and back.
A few new wrinkles I tossed in this time:
- For candy on the eye candy, I added my own logo to the CoolIiris menu bar. Easy stuff.
- Ever since May, something changed in either CoolIris or Flash (and no one is owning up) so that my previously working FLV videos that played inside the CoolIris wall now refused to play. They just spin and spin and spin, and CoolIris is not even acknowledging this as a bug. I ran an end around by doing anormal image and link to a web page– a page I created that autoplayed my flash video in a web player- e,g, http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/hawaii-50-ways.html
- Almost by accident– yes it was an accident or a typo– I found a new CoolIris trick. The normal thing is to make a thumbnail image by making copy of the full size image but smaller dimensions II do mine as 240 pixel wide JPEGs). While testing, I had noticed that I had a thumbnail of a different image than the full size- and when played in CoolIris, you get some neat transition effects. I used it on a few slides- as shown in the video below, not sure if it comes through as an effect (or a gimmick):
cool iris trick
A few other notes on my mad methods- I do everything to avoid the inevitable Sucky Hotel Internet. So I run my presentation in a web browser, but running locally from Apache running on my MacBookPro. That makes it run a little faster. IN addition, because of the awkward pauses while waiting for web sites to load– all of the external sites I planned to use I had pre-loaded as tabs in my browser, so all I needed to do was to minimize the CoolIris interface, and flip to the right tab.
So that was 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Hawaiian Style (pineapple and Canadian bacon??).
Book ’em, Dominoe.
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