Diego Berrueta

Some months ago, I wrote about my continuous attempt to improve my skills for delivering presentations by learning from the masters. Usually I'm constrained by the fixed style of scientific presentations, but this week I had an opportunity to try something different. I was asked to deliver an introduction on free (libre) software in an University course. This is a topic I've covered many times before, but I decided to innovate. I completely changed the scope, I dropped the old script and slides, and I tried a fresh approach by putting the focus on some relevant people. Inspired by Lessig's style, I prepared a huge number of slides, each one with a very simple idea (sometimes, just a word or an image).

I'm usually very auto critical, but I think this time I managed to do a decent job, and I matched the allocated time by the second. I felt comfortably while delivering my speech, and I copied a few new tricks from the masters. Regrettably, I also committed an act of betrayal and incoherence by using proprietary software to prepare the slides, but I excused myself in front of the audience. It was just an experiment, wasn't it?

After the presentation, I created an account on SlideShare and uploaded my slides. I've been aware of SlideShare for some time, but I never really liked it (one of the reasons being the difficulties to access to the contents without using proprietary software, which apparently no longer exist). The definitive push to join SlideShare was the recent announcement of their support for RDFa. Effectively, it is possible to get the RDF from their HTML pages using the RDFa Distiller. Really great news! I just hope other content-hosting services will start to deploy RDFa soon.