The "I'm feeling lucky" presentation technique

My presentation in dev mode, as post-its on my office wall

So, like I said yesterday, I don’t do a lot of presentations. And, like I said yesterday, after finding a pretty fundamental flaw in Apple’s presentation app Keynote, I didn’t want to use it to display slides in front of a roomful of people. So I decided to do something a bit different.

Instead of creating slides, I used Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.

“Let’s ask Google to provide some slides for us,” I said to my audience. They giggled a bit.

Needless to say, I did check first. I checked that all the phrases and words I intended to do “lucky” searches on ended up at useful pages. Things like “writing for the web” and “series of tubes” and “if the news is that important, it will find me” all performed as expected.

My only goof was to do a live lucky search for “How to catch mice”, which takes you to a (relatively harmless) page at Videojug, whose list of “Related” videos included something about breast enlargement. Still, that made everyone giggle a bit too, so it wasn’t all bad and it wasn’t all goof.

Anyway, I rather like this way of presenting, and it cuts out the hassle of making slides in the first place. Next time I have to stand up and speak, I shall do it this way again.

(If you want to see the slides I made but ended up not using, they’re here but obviously won’t make much sense without my associated nattering and waving-about of arms.)