·:[ Sound and Fury ]:·
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While reading to my son the other night, I was surprised by the ending of our new copy of Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf - rather than being killed - was sent off the forest with a stern warning to never come back and Grandma was let out of the closet. Huh? The wolf in The Three Little Pigs fared almost as well, climbing back up the chimney rather than being boiled in the pot. Peter’s Wolf also went back to the forest with a promise not to come back; the duck survived as well.

Why do we want to pretend that wolves don’t exist? Or that they can be reasoned with? Evil is in the world, and all too often its after children. In 2000, in the US alone, 879,000 children were victims of child maltreatment; 10% of them were sexually abused. Some estimate that as many as 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys are sexually exploited before they reach adulthood.

Children will encounter evil and cruelty. How much better to encounter evil first on their parents’ lap? Fairy tales like Peter and the Wolf show us that brave, good and clever children can conquer evil. And let’s not forget that Peter’s bravery is disminished when the evil he conquers is disminished.

In the documentary, Paper Clips a Holocaust survivor cautions against shielding our children from the hatred and intolerance, evil and cruelty in the world. Instead, she recommends, we must teach our children that it can be overcome with strength, courage and love.

The digital trust models that we’re used to all involve Alice trusting Bob and Bob trusting Tom, resulting in Alice trusting Tom to some degree based on a formula. In other words, I trust someone, they trust someone else, therefore I trust the stranger. This model of trust is fairly intuitive.

What actually happened on the Internet is something completely different. People may not trust a stranger, but they seem to trust a mob of strangers. Take eBay as the example. I routinely send my money to someone I don’t know in hopes that they will send me something that looks like what they told me it would. I trust that they will for two reasons. First, their feedback rating tells me that they have done this in the past. Second, we both know that if they don’t, I will leave negative feedback and adversely affect their future business. This trust takes a while to build and is fragile. One negative can impact sales by an average of 14%, as well as spark the begin of a decline that might only be solved by an identity-change. [1]

Another good example of a Mob Trust (TM) model is Amazon’s (www.amazon.com review system. Again, I may not trust one person’s opinion of a book, but when 100 people dislike the book, I’m more likely to listen.

A third example is the Internet Movie Database www.imdb.com rating system. One can compare the top 100 rated movies from IMDB with the top 100 from the American Film Institute. The AFI list is restricted to American-made films, which leaves out such strong performers as Kirosawa’s Ran. The IMDB seems heavily influenced by the technical-lean of most of its contributors; the Lord of the Rings ranks fairly high.

Taxonomies and ontologies are not a bad way to organize data. After all the Dewey Decimal System, Yahoo, and the yellow pages all use imposed structure and organization. Even this blog uses catagories. The problem begins to manifest itself when you try to search on concepts rather than on keywords, or if you need to find something that you don’t know what to call it.

Enter metadata and tags. Allowing (or forcing) people to set keywords on their own documents while they’re creating them. MS Word has had the ability to assign metatags for years. The two problems have been (1) I may not use the tags that you would use and (2) no one actually assigned them.

Enter folksonomies. The most popular examples are del.icio.us and Flickr. Both leverage the desire of individuals to sort their own data. The tags come from users who wish to sort their own bookmarks and their own pictures. Both then use the power of the network to consolidate the tags as well as show some interesting interconnections.

Update:Here’s another vote for ditching the slides: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/kill_your_prese.html

Others [edwardtufte.com] have written extensively on using something other than presentation software for a presentation. The keys for truly excellent presentations can be:

• Be passionate about your topic
• Have a specific point-of-view from which you tell the story
• Use pictures and graphics to clearly display complex relationships

Obviously, none of these have anything to do with presentation software, much less with PowerPoint. Unfortunately, many organizations require PPT files for briefings. Taskings come down, “Prepare 5 slides that explain the problem and recommended solution,” and off we go creating dumbed down versions of complex problems.

If you can’t bust out of the PPT though, what can you do? Here are some tips that may help:

• Ask for the “sale” first.
  All sales reps know that you have to ask for the sale to get it. When briefing courses of action, that means telling leadership the recommended course of action up front. Make this your first slide.
• Anticipate questions and provide the answers in advance.

Technical issues:

• Font
  Use a san-serif font (Arial or Verdana) for display and a serif font (TNR) for printing.
• Color
  Use a dark background and light text for display, and vice versa for printing. Consider highway exit signs - our eyes can more easily distinquish light text on dark when the display is large. Of coure, your newspaper is black on white.
• More than color
  Never use color alone to convey content. If you must use red/yellow/green, then use different characters as well and include a key. For example, * is high, # is medium and & is low. Remember that not everyone has a color printer and 10% of men are color-blind.