I would like to congratulate the Visual Being team on the occasion of the blog’s first birthday.

On March 9th of last year, we opened the proceedings with the post “Who’s Going?“, which also kicked off VB’s coverage of InfoComm. That was followed a few days later by “Visual Being?“, which described where the name came from and mapped out the territory we hoped to cover.

Although I wasn’t able to find a specific reference, it seems to be a given that a vast majority of new blogs don’t last more than a few months. Over the past year, VB has published 202 posts and our readers have posted 201 comments. I would like to thank both the contributors and our readers (especially those who have enriched our efforts with their comments and suggestions). We could not have reached this milestone with out your energy, your efforts and your generosity.

Posted by Lee Potts at 9:32 AM .

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Visual Being is looking to expand its team of contributors. If you are involved in any aspect of the presentation process, and would be willing to commit to posting at least once every two weeks, please contact Lee. It’s a great way to increase your online visibility without all the hassles of setting up and maintaining your own blog.

Posted by Lee Potts at 11:33 PM .

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Visual Being contributor and fellow Presentations Council steering committee member Todd Dunn has been elected to serve as council chairman starting in January. Most of the Visual Being contributors belong to the council and I strongly suggest that you join InfoComm International (formally the ICIA) and the council if presentations are an important part of what you do. Contact Mary Waldera for more information.

I’d also like to recognize the significant contribution of time, energy and ideas our current chairman, Bob Befus, has devoted to council. He has continued in the tradition begun by our first chairman, Ray Guyot, of working beyond the call of a volunteer’s duty to grow and develop the council into a fantastic resource for presentation professionals.

Posted by Lee Potts at 2:48 PM .

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A few of you have expressed some lingering doubt about my qualifications as Professor PowerPoint. Now it is official — my new educational template has been published on the Microsoft Assistance web site with my by-line — it is a seating chart for teachers to use in the classroom. So far there have been more than 4000 downloads — go figure. (Another one on long division is not far behind.)

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 4:33 PM .

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We would like to invite all of our readers to visit Speaker Ready – a virtual meeting space (chat room) for presentation professionals.

When Ray and I began Visual Being, we were aiming to create a community of presentation professionals built around the sharing of experience and knowledge. It’s in the nature of our profession that many of us work in isolation, lacking regular communication with a shared community of practice. Some of us are freelancers working in sole practitioner environments. Some of us work in the corporate world where no one else in the company does what we do. The bottom line is that almost everyone can benefit from more contact with his or her professional peers and Visual Being hopes to make getting that contact a little easier.

Speaker Ready takes the next step towards reaching that goal by making the opportunities for interaction more immediate and, well, interactive. Think of it as an online water cooler. We hope you will stop by and check it out the next time you are taking a break or at the end of a long day of overpowering PowerPoint. As of right now, we can’t guarantee that there will always be something going on in there. However, if all goes according to plan, that’s how it will be in the near future. In the meantime, we are in the process of setting up a schedule of regular (weekly?) sessions, so feel free to let us know what times and topics will work for you.

Posted by Lee Potts at 7:59 PM .

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Given that Visual Being is going to celebrate its six month anniversary in a couple weeks, I thought it might be a good idea to turn up the house lights, as it were, and find out a little about our audience. The idea occurred to me while reading Joi Ito’s description of an activity that took place at this year’s Foo Camp and I’m pretty much using the same questions with a minor alteration and an addition.

1) What do you make?
2) What is your favorite tool/toy?
3) Who are your presentation industry heroes?
4) What post category should Visual Being have that it’s missing now?

Please answer in the comments section. When we started this blog, we wanted to do what we could to gather a community of presentation professionals. I hope that providing Visual Being readers with a chance to learn about other readers will help to foster that sense of community.

Thank you in advance for participating.

Posted by Lee Potts at 12:03 PM .

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Got into Las Vegas around Noon today and am all checked in at the Hilton. I flew down from Seattle after speaking at another meeting and I’m having trouble thinking of two cities with more disparate vibes. I’ll tell you one thing though, Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport does an extremely good job of getting you off the plane, out the door and to the casino of your choice quickly and efficiently. I was in the Hilton lobby in less time than it took me to get my luggage at Sea-Tac.

Not much on the schedule for today. I’m going to try to check in at the conference later this afternoon. Then the presentation council folks are meeting at the Hilton lobby bar around 6:00 for a little pre-conference reunion. Feel free to stop by if you like, we’ll be easy to find. Just look for the loudest, most….

Well, you get the picture.

Tomorrow is, of course, Super Tuesday. That’s followed by the manufacturer’s industry forum, the open reception and the awards banquet. Busy day. Wednesday’s pretty busy too but I’ll do my best to post some of what’s going on sometime. I think it will largely depend on how well wired the convention center is.

Please don’t forget to make use of the online bulletin board we set up just for InfoComm. We’re hoping everyone will find it useful as clearinghouse for information about the conference.

Posted by Lee Potts at 6:22 PM .

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I have long observed the growth of the event planning industry and wondered how I might fit my skills as a technologist specializing in presentations into it. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on an awards show dedicated only to event planners. Several of the big winners were in the corporate arena. I am wondering whether any presentation pros have managed to make their expertise available successfully to this industry.

I am sure that the AV people among you have mined this mother lode. But I am wondering more from a technology/presentation area if anyone has been successful, and if so, how they did it and what specifically they were able to offer. Thanks.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:24 PM .

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Now it can be told and revealed. Check my story on InformIT for the full details of Microsoft PowerPoint Secedes from MS Office. Suffice it to say that this is huge, HUGE, HUGE — only my sources in the PowerPoint community let me reveal the sordid underbelly of what has been festering in Redmond. Here’s a hint — check the package of the next version of Office and guess what WON’T be there. Read it all now! (It’s all there with the full final slide show from the PowerPoint team).

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 5:05 PM .

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It’s kind of a long story. I registered the visualbeing.com domain a couple years ago after reading Robert Lindstrom’s excellent "Being Visual : A Guidebook for Strategic Presentation in the Rich-media Communications Era" as it was serialized on the Presenters University site. I was really taken with what Robert was saying and was planning on putting together a site around the notion of how it’s becoming increasing important to be visual. Needless to say, I never got around to taking the site beyond the initial "hey wouldn’t that be cool" stage and the domain lay fallow until we started kicking around the idea of a presentation professionals blog. The rest is, as they say, history.

Given all that, and given the sorts of topics we’ll most likely be spending a great deal of time discussing, it seems appropriate to kick off this new blog with this quote from the work that indirectly gave it its name:

“As the technology gains a foothold and becomes more commonplace, the market grows accustomed to the new technologies and expectations rise. For many companies, the bar has already been raised and rich-media communication is no longer an exception. It’s an expectation. "

Posted by Lee Potts at 11:57 PM .

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