Today, we are announcing a feature to help with this situation. You can now import your presentations from Speaker Deck and SlideShare. After importing your slides from one or both services, you will end up with a list of presentations in your account under Imported.

These won’t show up on your profile until you select to create a new presentation from that deck, or add it to a talk which doesn’t yet have slides attached. This is perfect if you are someone who took advantage of our Lanyrd import and now have a back catalog of drafts from Lanyrd which are missing a slide deck. One of your options when processing a deck is to simply remove it, so you don’t need to worry about creating duplicates.

You can find detailed documentation for Speaker Deck and SlideShare, or just head over to Notist, and the Imported navigation option under Edit Presentations.

One way to do that is through the use of categories. Categorisation is a useful way of grouping similar items and making them discoverable, but it can fall short in a few key places.

The first danger of categorisation is if you use too few categories. A small number of categories result in very broad and general subject areas that encompass so much as to be almost useless. However, if you have too many categories, it becomes laborious for users to find the right category to use, and it can feel like a chore. Save for a few twisted individuals, most of us don’t like to manually put things into categories. It’s dull and uninteresting work.

These issues all stem from asking the user to categorise their own work, so we decided we didn’t want to do that. Instead, we decided to try out a method of automatically categorising presentations.

Notist already extracts text content from any uploaded PDFs, and slides can be titled and annotated by the user once uploaded. We also have presentation titles and descriptions to work with, so there’s plenty of text-based information about each presentation that we can use as a basis for analysis.

The process analyses the text for themes, and results in a list of topics along with a score giving the probability of that topic being a good match for the content. This is important, as just because a presentation mentions a topic, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s about that topic.

For example, this presentation by Andrew Smith is about the concept of Portals in the React Javascript library, and is themed around the Portal video game. By extracting topics from the text, we can see that the presentation categorises for Cake, but only at about a 20% probability. Because the probability is so low, we can determine that the presentation talks about cake but isn’t about cake. The cake is a lie.

Over recent years an increasing number of alternatives have gained traction, both in the form of traditional desktop software and some more non-traditional alternatives. I’m going to look at some of those alternatives, and how you’d use them with your Notist profile.

Desktop options

Much in the style of Powerpoint, Apache’s OpenOffice Impress is a free and open source tool for building slide decks. Like most Office-style productivity suites from anyone but Microsoft, it’s a little bit stuck in the mid-1990s in terms of user interface, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good software.

LibreOffice Impress is an alternative (with its open source roots in the same product) that looks to have a slightly better interface. Both have options for Windows, Mac and Linux systems.

For those on a Mac, Deckset is an interesting alternative that we’ve reviewed before. Rather than building slides visually yourself, Deckset automatically constructs your slides from a document in Markdown format. You can choose a theme and have control over some presentational aspects through hints in the document, but the majority of the work is done for you. It’s not the right solution for everyone, but it can be useful when putting something together quickly.

All of these desktop options export slide decks to PDF format. You can upload those PDFs directly to Notist and we’ll turn them into a set of images for displaying on the web.

Online options

There’s no denying the trend of software moving from the desktop to online services. This is as true for presentation software as much as any other. Not surprisingly, there are lots of online services that will help you design and deliver a slide presentation right from within your web browser.

Some things to look for when choosing a browser-based solution is whether the service has an offline presenting option. Conference wifi isn’t always the best, so you might want to have that offline option available as a backup.

Slides.com is a popular subscription service for putting together presentations in you web browser. It has lots of options for integrating online media such as YouTube videos, and functionality for collaborating in teams. Higher paid plans have an offline option.

The big unique feature offered by Prezi is a break from the traditional linear approach to slide decks. Instead, it has a very idiosyncratic zoom in/out/around approach that is as likely to leave you feeling motion sick as informed. Some people really love the style though, and they claim some interesting science behind it, so props to them for doing something completely different. Presenting offline is available through a desktop app with some higher paid plans.

Ludus is a relative newcomer that offers a very slick in-browser editing experience that makes it easy to achieve some creative visual results without needing to be a PhotoShop master. Ludus has export options to support offline presenting.

It’s easy to overlook Google Slides as a viable option for working in a browser. Part of Google’s productivity suite, Slides takes a less radical approach than some competitors, but has a robust editor and can produce some good results. As you’d expect from Google, it’s free to use. Slides can run offline if you use the Chrome browser and enable the offline sync option.

All of these browser-based services will give you a shareable web link for your deck. You can add them to a presentation on Notist by selecting the “Link to a slide deck” option and pasting in the sharing link. Notist will then embed the remote slide deck right in your page.

Options for techies

If you’re a developer or power user and aren’t afraid to roll your sleeves up and work with some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, there a few options you can use to create presentations that you might host as part of your own website.

The most popular option is Reveal.js, which is a JavaScript presentation framework contributed to heavily by the people behind Slides.com mentioned above. It will turn a structured HTML document into a fully featured presentation, but you do need to be comfortable with some web development to get the most out of it. Because you can host the result anywhere, that can include on your laptop for offline presenting.

Shower is an option in a similar vein that is potentially less fully featured, but therefor less complex thean Reveal.js. Again, it needs web development skills but also gives you the ability to host the results yourself, including somewhere for offline access.

If you’re comfortable with React.js, then Spectacle Impress.js is a really impressive solution for building your own slides in a browser. It requires even more specialist web development skills to get up and running, but the results are impressive and it even has features like a presenter display.

With any of these self-hosted options, you can again add them to your presentation pages on Notist by URL. In order to do so, you’ll need to host your slides somewhere public such as on your own website. As long as there’s a public URL for the deck, you can add it to Notist.

As you can see, there are a wealth of options above and beyond PowerPoint and Keynote for creating presentations. Perhaps give some of them a go and see how they might fit your workflow.

Advent speaker tips: this is part of a series of tips for public speakers that we’re posting throughout advent. Check back daily during December for more.

When speaking becomes some or all of your job, it is work that you need paying for. Some speakers have a profile that can command a very high fee, but what about the rest of us?

The cost of a one hour talk

The thing about speaking is that while you might spend 30 minutes or an hour on stage, that might represent two or three weeks of work on the talk, plus the years of work that made you the person who could give that talk.

You also spend one or more days at the conference, an event which may expect you to be present and available for attendees. One or more days of travel each side, and depending on the distance a day of recovery from that travel. When you hear of people being paid large fees for speaking, and do the math, it turns out they are getting less than the hourly rate they could get for doing their job, for that time.

If you are to make speaking part of your job then it is worth working out the actual cost of delivering a talk, just as you would work out the costs of delivering anything else in a business.

But what about the exposure?

Often organizers will try to encourage people to speak for free or very little due to the “exposure” offered by their event. It may be that you are on a book tour and can sell books, or the event puts you in front of a very specific audience. Only you can make that judgement. However weigh these opportunities up against the real cost of attending before saying yes.

As Vitaly Friedman notes in his article Don’t Pay To Speak At Commercial Events,

“On a personal note, throughout all these years, I have rarely received consultancy projects from “exposure” on stage. More often than not, the time away from family and company costs much more than any honorarium provided.”

Ask for payment

In many industries, including my own, it is reasonably common for event organizers to only offer a fee when asked. I dislike the state of affairs as it results in those who are “in the know” getting paid when others do not. However because it happens, you need to make sure that you ask for your fee up front.

Most of my speaking requests come in via email, usually asking abouut my availability. At that point I will ask what the event is offering speakers by way of expenses and payment. I approach the subject with an expectation that I will be paid, and have a rate sheet that takes into account whether the event wants a completely brand new talk, or something already presented.

Whether you are willing to negotiate your price is up to you. On that subject I listened to a really interesting interview between Tim Ferris and Seth Godin, where they discussed the concept of your fee being “full price or free”, as in people either pay the full price for your services or the event is something you are happy to give your time to as a volunteer and so there is no charge. No in-between, no messing about.

Conferences with “no money to pay speakers”

There are not-for-profit, community events which may run on a shoestring budget in order to be able to keep ticket prices as low as possible. As a professional speaker it is likely that you will be happy to volunteer some of your time to these events, and you can make that choice on a case by case basis. I like to try and speak at community events when I can, as there will often be very different audience at those events when compared to the bigger commercial conferences.

My rule is that if the event is commercial, and either directly making money via ticket sales and sponsorship, or is essentially a promotional event for a company, then speakers should be paid too. I’m a web developer, I wouldn’t offer to build a company a website for free, speaking is the same deal.

Help out newer speakers

Make sure that speakers new to the circuit are aware of the need to ask for payment and expenses, and encourage them to do so. Events only get free work if people are willing to do free work. The more people who share information about conferences that are not treating people well, or who are only paying people when the issue is pressed, the less able these events are to get away with it.

Advent speaker tips: this is part of a series of tips for public speakers that we’re posting throughout advent. Check back daily during December for more.

Mind maps are a type of diagram that works well for showing the relationships between pieces of information, but without putting them into an order. Below you can see a map for a presentation I created about web development.

Staying Healthy

Being sick is no fun, being sick when you are travelling or have a talk to give is many degrees less fun. Travel and meeting a lot of people does make it more likely to catch bugs, however there are simple steps you can take to lessen your chances, or at least help you bounce back to health more quickly.

Getting enough sleep, not drinking too much alcohol, getting into the fresh air to walk or run, and eating as healthily as is possible while on the road is really at the core of this. It does mean you need to be a little strict with yourself, given the party atmosphere of a lot of events. I find that deciding up front whether or not I’m going to have a drink or stay out late and sticking to that is helpful. If you know the late night party is not going to be a good thing for you, let attendees know where else they can chat to you. In many cases conference parties are the worst place for good conversations, as you end up yelling over loud music. You can be available without feeling you need to hang around a party when you would rather be in bed!

Pre-planning is also useful where food is concerned. Some conferences do wonderfully healthy food and snacks, however the majority serve things which are fine as something you eat occasionally, but are best avoided as a main source of nutrition. In particular the morning and afternoon snacks, which are usually cakes and cookies. To avoid temptation, carry some healthy snacks in your bag to eat instead.

In addition to giving your immune system a boost, remember to wash your hands a lot - especially when meeting lots of people and shaking hands.

Staying fit

Put together a fitness routine you can do on the road, even if the hotel gym has a mismatched set of dumbells and an ancient treadmill. Then stick with it. I’m a runner so I combine seeing a little of the places I visit with getting my training done, but heading out for a walk, hiring a bike, or finding a local swimming pool are all achievable even with very little time to spare. I really love it if there is a conference run - that way we get to meet and chat with each other as well as get some exercise.

As with eating well, it is much easier to stick to a fitness routine if you have planned it out earlier. I like to pop my nose into the gym when I arrive at a hotel, so I know what I have to work with and can plan my morning session in advance. There are lots of online programmes you can sign up for which give you daily yoga classes or other workouts, which can be helpful in motivating you to keep to your routines.

Taking time out for you

You don’t have to sit through the entire conference because you are speaking at it, in fact the sessions that interest you less, or where you have seen that speaker’s talk before, can be a very good time to get some time away from crowds. I go hide in my room, or take myself off to a coffee shop. Some conferences are kind enough to create a speakers green room, or a quiet room for attendees and speakers. These places can be havens for a little bit of time out.

If you take your time out during a session, then you can go mingle during the breaks, which is when people are free to speak with you.

Watch your back!

Doing work while travelling is made a lot better if you don’t have permanent back and neck ache from hunching over a laptop. I take my Roost Stand everywhere I go, to get my laptop to a good height for working. It makes all the difference, as does trying to get the desk chair in your room to a good height for the desk - I find those useless scatter cushions are often ideal for this!

Plan flights carefully

Do a bit of research on flight times so that you can arrive and leave at good times for you. A good example is my possible routes to Australia. I can do one route which lands me in Sydney after 24 hours or more of travel at 5am, leaving me staggering round in a blur for a day. Or, there is a routing that lands me at 5pm. Arriving at 5pm means having dinner, going to bed and waking the next morning feeling pretty much ok. This can make a huge difference to how I feel for the rest of my stay.

Bring your hobbies on the road

Some hobbies don’t work so well on the road but many do, and travel can sometimes be a way to find new ones. If you travel a lot, spending some time doing something unrelated to your job is so important, to not feel as if you are essentially working 24/7. I have friends who bring their knitting to conferences, or take the chance to visit art galleries. I enter local races and parkruns and indulge my interest in aviation by visiting air and space museums. You can usually add an extra night onto your stay by offering to pay for that night in the hotel. Give yourself a little breathing room and a chance to do something fun in your location - these mini breaks in a busy schedule can make all the difference to how you feel.

Advent speaker tips: this is part of a series of tips for public speakers that we’re posting throughout advent. Check back daily during December for more.

Any good piece of writing has both an audience and a purpose. The difficulty with writing a good abstract for a call for papers is that a couple of short paragraphs need to serve two different audiences with two different, but related, purposes.

The first audience is the individuals or panel of people who will be putting together the event at which you hope to present. Their goal is to find interesting content for their event, delivered by experienced, authoritative and engaging speakers. They want to find great content, so as a writer you’re trying to really sell them on your presentation and make it sound exciting and compelling. This can result in a description that isn’t inaccurate, but certainly shines a specific type of light on the material.

The issue can arise when, after being selected to present at an event, the organisers don’t give you the opportunity to revise your abstract. More often than not, the abstract from the CfP is added to the event website and schedule as the definitive description of your talk. It’s at this point that it reaches its second audience.

For single-track events, that’s not so bad. The audience that is trying to make a decision whether to attend the event isn’t all that different from the selection panel reading the CfP proposals. No, the issue is more with larger multi-track events. With these events, attendees are given a wide array of options of presentations to attend, and usually all they have to work from is your talk title and abstract.

People in this situation really want to know exactly what the content of the presentation is and what they’ll learn from it. They need to make a choice and then commit to a session, as if they get that choice wrong and pick based on a misleading abstract, they’ll have missed the start of any of the alternatives they might wanted to have switched to.

So how do you go about writing a good abstract that works for both the CfP selectors and the audience member trying to make a critical decision about which room to pick after a coffee break? Turns out if you’re mindful of those two audiences it’s not so hard.

Try to include three key points:

1. Tell them what’s exciting. This is the part of the superlatives and to get the CfP reviewers on board. “x is the biggest industry change in years, and everyone needs to learn more about it!”
2. State what will be covered. Let the audience know what the main points of the presentation are. “You’ll find out about x and y, and how using z can benefit your workflow.”
3. Say who it’s for. Help the audience be self-selecting with regard to their skill and experience level, and at the same time help the CfP reviewers see if this presentation matches their target audience. “This is great for people who know a little about x but what to take it further.”

With a little bit of care and thought as to the different audiences, writing a great presentation abstract isn’t as hard as you’d think!

Advent speaker tips: this is part of a series of tips for public speakers that we’re posting throughout advent. Check back daily during December for more.

Confessions of a Public Speaker

My favourite book on being a public speaker is Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun. That book also features in a story from my first big speaking engagement. Despite the fact I now speak at around 30 events a year, it wasn’t always that way, I was terrified of public speaking. Once I had decided to give it a try I read several books, but Confessions of a Public Speaker was the one to which I kept returning, as it didn’t just give speaking tips, but also addressed all the weird fears I had of things going wrong, in a way that made me feel I could do this.

I was so nervous about speaking I hadn’t looked at the lineup for the event, when I did I realised that Scott was actually going to be speaking at the event too! So, I had chance to thank him in person. This book is my top pick for speakers experienced and brand new.

TED Talks

The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking is by head of TED Chris Anderson. It’s an enjoyable read for any speaker, explaining how best to create content that will get your ideas across.

Talk Like TED

In Talk Like TED Carmine Gallo deconstructs successful talks to show why they work. As all of the TED talks are online, you can look at the original talk and then read Gallo’s assessment of it.

The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs

Also by Carmine Gallo, and in a similar vein to Talk Like TED, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs deconstructs the talks given by Steve Jobs. Once again you can find the talks online to refer to.

Presentation Now: Prepare a first rate presentation when you’re short of time

In Presentation Now Andrew Lightheart explains how to create and deliver a top class presentation, without needing to sweat over it for weeks. Even if you aren’t short of time this is an excellent read for any presenter or would-be presenter.

Demystifying Public Speaking

In Demystifying Public Speaking Lara Hogan gives a practical and sensible guide to preparing and delivering your presentation. An excellent read for new and nervous speakers.

And a few more

In addition to the books above, which are all those I have read and would recommend, I asked on Twitter for recommendations from other people. In the main the same few books were suggested but also a couple of additional resources.

Alan Dalton recommended The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as “it has great advice about empathising with your audience.”

Kristīne Corbus replied to share a useful resource, that isn’t a book, but is similarly long form content. The Blazingly Simple Guide To Getting Your COnference Talk Accepted by Rob Lambert.

Advent speaker tips: this is part of a series of tips for public speakers that we’re posting throughout advent. Check back daily during December for more.

There’s good reason for this - if a picture paints a thousand words, a video has the potential to paint 25,000 words per second. So how can we make use of video to change the way we present, and change the way we reach audiences with our presentations?

There’s a couple of really easy ways to start.

Make video of your presentations

Sharing slides online is a great way to provide notes for people who were in the audience when you gave your presentation. Depending on the style of slides you’ve produced, they might even stand alone in communicating many of the key points your presentation makes.

But they’re not your presentation.

If you’d really like to reach a new audience online, an ideal way is to post a video of you delivering your talk. There’s a couple of ways you can make that happen. If you’re lucky enough that the event had a videographer to record your presentation and has made the videos available, then that would obviously be ideal.

If that’s not the case, then you’re looking at needing to create one yourself. You’d be surprised at how simple that can be. One option is to set yourself up with a screen for your slides and a phone, webcam, or video camera to present ‘live’ to camera. If that’s not for you, another option is to use screen recording software to make a video of your slides with your voice overdubbed, or with a picture-in-picture webcam video of yourself in the corner. Perhaps try recording five minutes of a presentation with different options and configurations and see what works best for you.

Once you have a video, you can add it to your presentation page on Notist. You do this by uploading it to a video sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo, and then pasting the URL of that page into the Video tab when editing your presentation on Notist.

If you have slides already added, the video will slot into place further down the page like this example from Rachel Andrew. If you don’t have slides and just add a video, it becomes the featured item at the top of the page, like this example from Aaron Bassett.

 Use video in your presentations

Another great way to use video is within your presentation itself. Powerpoint, Keynote and the like are all capable of playing back video clips, and this can be a powerful way to illustrate a point as you present. (Although remember to think about copyright issues and be sure your case falls under fair use.)

If your presentation is technical and involves demoing something taking place on the computer (perhaps showing new software, or doing a live coding demo), consider pre-recording that segment as a screencast. This will not only free you up to describe what’s happening without needing to operate the computer at the same time, but it also means you can be sure it’s all going to work correctly before you step up on stage!

A related idea is the area of motion graphics. Sometimes showing moving on a slide can communicate an idea or a change in information much more clearly than individual static images. Modern versions of presentation software make it relatively easy (with a bit of practise) to add object movements and transitions into slides to help breathe some life into the content you’re delivering.

When it comes to sharing those slides afterwards, you might think you’re out of luck. If you export your deck to a PDF, you’ll obviously lose any video or motion. The good news is (of course!) that Notist enables you to add it back.

When editing your slidedeck, Notist Pro users can replace any slide with something new. That can be an updated version of the same slide (fix that typo!), an animated version as a GIF, or with a video URL from YouTube, Vimeo or other video sharing site.

When a visitor browses your slides, the video will appear in the correct context along with the other slides. You can see an example in this deck from Rachel Andrew again.

Video can be a really powerful tool for communicating ideas in an engaging way, so why not give it a try!

Advent speaker tips: this is part of a series of tips for public speakers that we’re posting throughout advent. Check back daily during December for more.