As I mentioned in my last post, I went to BarCamp Seattle for the first time. That post featured my talk, “Content Lessons from Comics,” whic went from notions to presentation in 3.5 hours.
It was a rough mishmash of a few ideas that had been kicking around my head, and it was a pretty good talk under those circumstances. (I’ve heard myself quoted twice, which is delightfully odd. Once at a later session, and once by Heidi Miller.)
What would I do differently?
- I’d lead a discussion, rather than give a presentation. One of the best sessions I went to was Kristin Marshall’s “Tits or GTFO: Women in Tech.” She threw out a few ideas and opened the floor, which spent the next half hour in lively debate.
- Or I’d plan a presentation ahead of time. Bruce P. Henry gave my favorite session, “Why Everything Is Late: From Projects to Dinner Parties.” He had slides. Which he knew cold. Nicely done.
Either of those would’ve helped me focus more on the presentations being given — my attention span got vaster after I’d given my presentation.
- One more thing: I’d have gone a little more basic with my presentation. If you weren’t into content as a web discipline, my talk was probably hard to follow. (One question at the end: “Won’t the people who publish those comics want to enforce their copyright?” That’s when I realized I might have gone a little too metaphorical in a literal-heavy crowd.)
You’ll likely see some of the ideas from “Content Lessons from Comics” fleshed out here in later posts. (And I’ll pretend some of the other ideas are non-canonical and never happened in the first place.)
Some of them may even crop up at Seattle InfoCamp in early October. That was another lesson learned from BarCamp: How to participate in an unconference. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll do BarCamp again — I think I’ve got about 48 weeks to decide — but I’ll definitely keep camping somewhere.
Thanks for the props on the presentation! I’ve been doing that talk for a while and am getting it honed for a more general audience. So I really appreciate the feedback from folks at an event like Bar Camp.
I thought that the Content Lessons from Comics talk was a great concept. Keep plugging away and giving the talk every chance you get. A good talk is like a performance, you need to rehearse a lot before your first performance and even then it just gets better as you get more performances under your belt.
Keep polishing, see what the audience responds to, and bring more of that into the talk.
Oh yeah, pictures help. =-)