Pooya Darugar makes a connection that could create fundamental changes in the way every presentation professional does their job:
“Tagging seems to be all the rage and I think I’m beginning to believe that it can be useful for certain situations; here’s an example of how I think it’ll actually help businesses. I was creating a powerpoint presentation today for a client and came to the realization that there’s really no good way to organize and search slides. I know I have slides that cover most of the points I’m trying to get across hidden in some previous presentations, but how do I find them? That’s where I think tagging could be useful. If we (or the marketing people that create these slides) could tag them with keywords AND there was a nice way to search through many presentations based on tags, I could easily have done my task today in 1/10th the time.”
Combine this idea a service like Technorati (more) or with RSS technology and the possibilities for slicing and dicing presentation material become seriously mind boggling. It seems to me that presentations could become very fluid, perhaps even to the point of being nearly self-assembling (at least for the first draft). Think along the lines of presenting by making use of a “cloud of slides”, rather than showing a traditional, static presentation. How would the skills needed to present successfully change when it’s possible to pull together a presentation while you’re giving it.
Of course, you would still have all of the problems inherent in organizing material using tags (how do you measure the confidence you should have in the way a particular tag is used for a particular slide). You would also have to radically alter the way Microsoft thinks about presentations and convince them they need to made very deep changes in the way PowerPoint works.
The possibilities seem very exciting. Or am I just getting caught up in the hype that seems to surround everything having to do with tagging these days. You tell me.
Posted by Lee Potts in PowerPoint, Presentation Design, Software, Technology, Tools