I ran my Blogs & RSS presentation by my non-techie colleagues this afternoon.

Some stuff I want to improve:

• Make the visuals more impactful. No. To begin with, get more visuals. My presentation is quite texty.
• The RSS portion descended into chaos. I need to be sure of my sequence, and note exactly what examples I should use. Less jumping back and forth between PowerPoint, FreeMind and Firefox.
• Need to up my energy levels. My lethargy carried over to the audience. To mitigate, the presentation was after lunch…
• Need to be more interactive. It started off fine but became one-way towards the RSS bit. Then again, that’s the part which is confusing.
• Without going into tagging and other cool and useful things, it’s hard to drive home the utility of feeds. But at the same time, not introducing these meant fewer things for the audience to digest, which is a good thing.
• Will have to carefully pack what I need. This time, I ran it through a remote desktop connection. While it was fine today, I can’t assume it’ll be fine on Monday. Must plan multiple backups.
• Can’t assume the presentation PC has Firefox. And it definitely will not have FreeMind. In times like these, I wish I had a laptop. Can use the office laptop, but it won’t be the same.

On the bright side:

• The mindmap handout was well received.
• I think my colleagues had a much better understanding of blogs and feeds after I was done. Particularly, I’ve erased the notion that blogs are purely for personal use/gratification.

Technorati Tags: presentation, blogs, rss, feeds