How to make PowerPoint presentations look good in SlideShare and DimDim

Lately I’ve been working a lot with SlideShare and DimDim to show PowerPoint presentations to customers and prospects. I try avoid “death by bulletpoint“, and instead incorporate a lot of diagrams into my slides in order to complement my speaking points. Unfortunately, a lot what looks great in PowerPoint 2007 (Windows) and 2008 (Mac) look awful in SlideShare and DimDim.

So, here is a checklist of things to avoid so that your slides look fine whether they are rendered in PowerPoint, SlideShare, or DimDim:

• Don’t use slick color gradations that PowerPoint 2008 uses by default. Use basic, solid colors.
• Don’t use shadows on objects.
• Don’t depend on builds within a single slide. Instead, use multiple slides to create a build. Tedious but worth it for complex diagrams.

What else can you think of?

Hopefully someday these kinds of issues will be taken care of as SlideShare and DimDim mature. And, one would hope that, as Microsoft creates more online offerings around Office, they will provide a way to faithfully render PowerPoint slides online.

Four essential online marketing resources

Today, I shared the links below with a friend who’s starting a business. In the spirit of helpfulness, I’m republishing them below.

Granted, these won’t be new to anyone reads the major social marketing / Web 2.0 blogs out there. Nonetheless, these are solid resources for online marketing that might not be known to mainstream business folks.

• Presentation design: http://www.presentationzen.com/
• Inspirational presentations often have minimal words and great pictures. Here’s where to find the latter: http://flickr.com/ (tip: sort pictures by “Most Interesting”)
• Social marketing is a very capital efficient way to market. This guy’s a master: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/
• Screencasts on your web site — of you talking about your service, or better yet, one of your customers talking about it — are very effective. Here’s a very easy way to create them: http://www.jingproject.com/ Then upload to YouTube — lots of traffic there, and thus people who could potentially find your service useful.

Observations from this month’s Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup

Here are a couple of interesting things I learned at this month’s Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup, specifically the first presentation by Michael Hartl of InsoshI.

The first is how GitHub leverages the power of decentralization. Let me explain how I understand this work: GitHub encourages people to fork off of existing projects. So, if someone wants to add a fix to an open source project, they make their own, add the fix, and publish it on GitHub. Eventually they ping a core contributor to have their changes added back into the main branch. GitHub’s very good at merging changes back into a branch, so this is fairly painless.

Here’s why this is so significant. Traditionally, it’s taken a long time for fixes to get much distribution. This is because there was only one central repository for any open source project. Before any fix could be checked into the main branch, it would have to get reviewed and approved. This would take time. What GitHub does is remove this bottleneck. So more fixes get published more quickly.

You’d think forking would be a bad thing — a proliferation of nonstandard branches. But it isn’t. GitHub’s merge capabilities mean that these fixes find their way into the main branch.

Seeing this presentation makes me wonder why any open source project would NOT be on GitHub.

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The second thing I learned was from watching how Michael does test-driven development. It’s all testing, all the time. I believe the tools being used were Rake, Growl, and Textmate. Tests are automatically run every minute or so in the background. Test results summaries are displayed in Growl alerts: a green box displaying how many tests passed, a yellow one with how many tests are undefined, and red with how many failed. The alerts fade from the screen after a few seconds.

It’s not a big production, moonshot-style, let’s-run-the-nightly-test-suite kind of thing. Rather, it’s simple, continual testing that provides a steady drumbeat of feedback to the developer. Ambient is the best word that comes to mind.

Words like these don’t really do it justice — you have to see it for yourself to fully appreciate what’s going on. It’s a subtle change, but one that I think will make a big change over time in terms of the quality and velocity of software development.

twitrratr is a great tool for product managers

Just now read about twitrratr on TechCrunch. How they describe themselves:

Discover what people are really saying on Twitter. With Twitrratr you can distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

This is a great tool for product managers, marketers and anyone who wants have their finger on the pulse of a market. It lets you quickly determine people’s overall sentiments about any topic being twittered. For instance, here are twitrratr summaries for Obama and McCain and twitrratr itself.

Twitrratr isn’t perfect. It could use some improvement in terms of how it recognizes positive and negative sentiments. But even with these warts, it’s still a useful service with a lot of promise. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter acquired twitrratr, like they did with Summize.

But, please, twitrratr — get a name that’s easier to remember and type!

The coolest product of the year?

… could be the Nike Hindsight, new sunglasses that provide the wearer an extra 25 degrees of peripheral vision. They’re being promoted as cycling gear, but it seems they could have a wide range of applications, including everyday driving. As for myself, these are definitely something that I’d find useful for competitive sailing.

WordPress.com wish list…

While WordPress works wonderfully overall, I just gotta get these gripes off my chest.

I wish that WordPress supported:

• MyBlogLog, or something similar, perhaps using their Gravatar service.
• ShareThis, a widget for sharing blog posts on social media sites.
• Google Reader’s Shared Items
• Atom feed format, not just RSS

The good thing, WordPress seems to have a good “feature velocity”, and as such, hopefully these things will be addressed in a reasonable time.

Movin’ on up…

…from TypePad to WordPress. I must say, WordPress just feels better. I can’t put my finger on any one single feature that makes me say this. Just lots, and lots, of well-thought-out details.

Meanwhile, TypePad hasn’t really changed since I started using it in 2005 — it feels very web 1.0.

Oh, and WordPress is free. That helps, too.