·:[ Sound and Fury ]:·
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We’ve noticed this before, but now people seem to be actually using Amazon’s ProductWiki. Seeing how people can already comment in the Reviews section, one wonders how this will be used or abused. They suggest that their readers/writers should “Think of a Wiki as an encyclopedia entry that everyone who comes to the page will read.” Obviously, they’ve heavily influenced by Wikipedia, but who isn’t. A wiki is a way for a community to create content. It needn’t be encyclopedic, but perhaps the ‘pedia’s influence on wikis has contorted their flexibility.

So far, their 2200-some entries are unremarkable, with some link spam and pet projects. The wiki lacks social construct, such as being able to see who edited what. Maintenance pages, like recent changes, are also missing, although “recently edited” is available. The distinction, while subtle, is important. I can see what was edited, but not how. Therefore, I can’t police the wiki for Amazon. Let’s see how long this lasts.

PowerPoint is not a good way to make a sale or to make a decision. It’s not. Really.

Evidence the continual attempts to squeeze this round peg. Lately, Guy Kawasaki lays down some rules about giving a PP pitch to venture capitalists. His basic advice (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 pitch font) isn’t bad; the underlying premise is. The best way to convince someone to give you their money is tell a compelling story.

And you can do that without any slides at all.

If you must provide something for people to look at, hand out a single sheet of paper with the important information you want them to remember. Your name, contact information, salient points. Send it to them ahead of the brief, so they can be ready for questions. Okay, maybe the head folks won’t read it, but their staff will. Then use all of your one hour meeting to have a discussion.

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.

While on a recent trip, I stumbled across Lauren Myracle’s novel, TTYL [laurenmyracle.com]. Written for and about teenaged girls, she uses their language - instant messages. The pages look like screen shots, complete with emoticons.

This reminded me of Hawaiian pidgin. When we were living in the islands in the early 90s, a young author submitted poetry written in this unique blend of English, Chinese, Tagalog, and Japanese. The reactions went from decrying the fall of civilization “as we know it” to embracing this expression and legitimizing this “new” language. Now, barely 10 years later, pidgin is considered a valid creole by many. (Creoles are pidgins that have had valid grammatical structure imposed upon them.)

IM slang is emerging as a pidgin, so a creole may not be far behind. Creoles normally emerge a full generation after the pidgin. The Internet clock may speed this transition.

Since teenagers always grow up, many move on to college and into the workforce. They expect to be able to IM their colleagues. Will their chosen language be Imglish? Moving imglish from IMs into emails is the first, easy step, and has already been done with some acroynyms. The spoken word is likely to follow.

For precedents, consider that “cc” is often used as a verb and ASAP is pronounced as one word. Those of us who grew up with Tigger know that “TTFN” means ta-ta for now. Since some imglish is phonetic already (CU), they won’t be recognizable as imglish. Others (poof) will be more obvious for the indoctrinated and confusing for the out-crowd.

Sad to say, I’m not the first to use imglish to describe this phenomenon. The good folks over at Urban Dictionary beat me to it.

A novel written entirely in this pidgin is an interesting harbinger.