Ad verba per numeros

Two books and three kinds of blogs

Thursday, August 14, 2008, 07:51 AM
I've just bought these two books: "Small is the new big" by Seth Godin and "Presentation Zen" by Garr Reynolds. I talked before about Reynolds in a short post about presentations (the good ones, I mean), and I reached Godin through this guy because, according to Reynolds, he is a remarkable speaker.

The first book, "Small is the new big", is a rather convenient collections of posts and columns by Godin so you can read it in your own anarchic way (in fact, this is the recommended way). The table of contents and the final index are quite useful to find the bits you can be interested in a given moment.

In one of his essays Godin claims that there are just three kinds of blogs: Cats blogs, Boss blogs and Viral blogs.

You can or cannot agree with the names but I certainly agree with his taxonomy. The first type consists of those blogs describing personal, intimate, and mostly irrelevant-to-third-persons details. The third one are those blogs which tend to expose ideas whose authors would like to spread among a legion of devout followers. The "Boss blog" type (I don't really like the name at all) is what this blog seems to be: that is, "a blog to communicate to a defined circle of people." Well, it's good to know (although spreading ideas among devout followers could also be quite appealing).

By the way, in this other previous post you can read about another compelling argument to start your own "boss blog".

With regards to the second book, "Presentation Zen", I've hardly given it a glance but I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot. After all, I've been for a long time thinking about good presentations (specially in teaching/scholarly settings) and it's a field where I really want to improve. Unfortunately, not all the ideas from the book can possibly be applied given my "scenario"; for instance, the idea of Pecha Kucha (using just 20 slides with each one appearing just 20 seconds) although interesting/appealing/striking is not for us, lectures (although students would probably love the idea of lessons lasting less than 7 minutes).

Update August 14: I've just read in Presentation Zen (the blog) about the Ignite presentation method. It's mostly equivalent to Pecha Kucha but changing the thresholds. That is, instead of having 20 seconds per slide and 20 slides you have 15 seconds per slide and the same 20 slides; this way you have 5 minutes instead of the (utterly weird) 6.67 minutes of Pecha Kucha.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll find lots of tips and tricks in the book to apply in my future speeches.

P.S. Yep, the post is written in English; it's the first one in this blog and I hope it not to be the last one. You know, "When in Rome..."


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