Forget about slides. In today’s hyperlink world, a classic presentation feels like being inside of a corridor without the option to enter any of the side doors.

If you’re still stuck on PowerPoint presentations, it may be time to try out more dynamic alternatives, like Prezi, which has the financial and advisory back of TED and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

TechCrunch contributor Robin Wauters called Prezi “the coolest online presentation tool I’ve ever seen.” And Garr Reynolds, who coined the phrase ‘Presentation Zen,’ earlier this year declared Prezi a presentation tool more suitable for the digital natives than its competitors.

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I was a little exorcised last night when I read about Google and Verizon possibly two-timing the FCC on net neutrality. In the middle of industry/FCC discussion (at least nine meetings in seven weeks), Google and Verizon reportedly reached a deal to privilege YouTube bits.

My gut response was along the lines of “so this is what ‘do no evil’ means?”

I wrote about this at TheModerateVoice and syndicated the essay on Newsvine. The TMV post was featured in TheHill’s morning reads. (Blatant self-promotion.) Woot! Read more…

Tracy and her husband Patrick are the publishers of the West Seattle Blog, one of the hyperlocal weblogs that have proved it is possible to make a living from community journalism in a neighborhood or small town. She has been identified as one of the communicators who is finding ways of making sense of news as a business by people like the Poynter Institute — she is part of their Sense-Making Project — and the News Innovation program at CUNY. Read more…

Last month, Wolfire Games, an independent game developer and distributor, unleashed a pay-what-you-want campaign for a bundle of indie games that seemed to take a play from the famous Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment. The Humble Indie Bundle, as it was called, was offered from May 4 through May 11, and generated over $1.2 million in revenue for the game developers who participated, as well as two charities.

The bundle initially consisted of five indie games: World of Goo (2D Boy), Aquaria (Bit Blot), Gish (Edmund McMillen), Lugaru (Wolfire Games), and Penumbra: Overture (Frictional Games ). Later, Amanita Design kicked in a sixth game, Samorost 2. All the  games run on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.

People could literally pay anything they wanted for the Humble Indie Bundle, starting at $.01. The largest single donation rang in at $3,333.33. I personally paid $10.01. You could choose to allot part or all of the price to the two charities, Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). While you could have bought the games or donated to the charities separately, the combination of the two made the bundle appealing. You can’t deny the power of one -stop shopping.

John Graham, Chief Operating Officer of Wolfire Games, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the Humble Indie Bundle campaign in a post-promotion debriefing.

How did the idea for the pay-what-you-want Humble Indie Bundle come about?
Ever since the success of 2DBoy’s pay-what-you-want experiment and our Organic Indie Preorder Pack [a game bundle of Wolfire’s Overgrowth and the Unknown Worlds’ Natural Selection 2], we had this feeling that independent developers could really do a lot to promote themselves.
How did you decide what games to put in the bundle?

Our main requirement for this bundle was that we needed awesome indie games available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.  We didn’t have a fancy rubric, and weren’t maximizing any kind of bundle hotness equation, but I think it’s fair to say that we ended up with a group of games that are all different but very awesome.
Have you ever tried anything like this before? Did you learn anything from the Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment?

Well, our theory was that a pay-what-you-want bundle would maximize participation and also allow people to feel like they were getting their money’s worth, and I think this proved true.  With pirated copies already easily available for all the games, we figured our biggest risk was not piracy but rather that we would spend a lot of time on this promotion, and then no one would hear about it. Read more…

Microsoft recently announced that the consumer version of Office 2010  will soon be available for free: Office Web Apps. This might just make Google start sweating. If not, it should.

Let’s face it: given the choice between Google Docs and the polished, well-tested and universally approved Microsoft Office, which would you choose? Yep, Office. After all, then you know your recipient will be able to open, read and edit the document, know how it works and not have to sign up for any new account. Office is the industry standard. Now you can access the docs everywhere, without e-mailing them, carrying them on a flash drive or bringing your laptop to the site where you need your docs. You can log into any PC and get your stuff. You can get the docs on your mobile phone. It’s where you are when you need it. Read more…

This morning, @biz (Biz Stone) and @ev (Evan Williams) kicked off Twitter’s first official developer conference, Chirp, with some facts and data and a stunning announcement related to the Library of Congress.

First, the numbers. There are 105.8 million registered users but 180 million monthly unique visitors to the website. The deduction: non-registered users read tweets. And we know that registered users read tweets primarily from other devices. Williams noted that Twitter is currently handling 3 billion requests a day; this API-driven traffic is equivalent to Yahoo, he said, noting that no other major service is this distributed.

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Every year, thousands of bands, bloggers, filmmakers, social media gurus and entrepreneurs come to the South By Southwest Music, Film and Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. When I joined the MCDM program in 2008 and heard about SXSW, I started to work on plans to be actively involved. Sooner than expected I had the opportunity to participate on one of the music panels—and got to spend a week soaking in the latest in digital media, while enjoying entertainment and Southern hospitality. Attending SXSW was well worth the lessons, networking contacts and, sometimes, the free food.

Pitching a panel

Last November, at the Showbox in downtown Seattle, I met with the SXSW music committee, which was accepting submissions from bands, record labels, and anyone else who wanted to pitch an idea. For the past two years, I have been filming a documentary on legendary blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter and using the MCDM program as a testing ground for the documentary’s online marketing and digital distribution strategies. I successfully pitched an MCDM-inspired panel based on the evolution of Lead Belly’s music from analog recordings to digital formats. Staying true to the digital storytelling code of honor, my presentation, “Lead Belly to Ludacris: From Analog to Digital,” included a video mash up I produced especially for the panel. The video mixed a rare performance of Lead Belly with hip-hop artist Ludacris covering a popular folk song. (You can read a review of my panel in the Austin Chronicle.)

Best of SXSW

In addition to presenting, I learned about a few innovative technologies and saw some great films at SXSW. Here are some of the highlights:

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Comparison of video size, iPad and iPod Touch

As far as tech toys go, I’m a late adopter.  I like playing with free betas, but when it comes down to handing over money, I become very conservative.  I like at least one Service Pack on my new OS, a critical mass of my friends on social apps, a solid couple of months post-release on a massively multiplayer online game, and a stalwart recommendation from my IT friends for new hardware.  I delayed my purchase of my Xbox 360 for almost two years; then shortly after I bought it, they announced the big price drop with the addition of the Elite model (shoulda waited longer!)

But this time, I threw the dice and pre-ordered a 32 GB Wifi-only iPad.  I even threw in a Mac Bluetooth keyboard, the dock, and a case.  There’s no super feature that made this the penultimate gadget for me; my desires were based around a great experience with my iPod Touch, a slowly growing interest in e-books (much to the dismay of my library card) and the ability to have a “one-stop-shop lite” computing device.  I game some, I email a fair amount, I watch videos while I travel or work out (no more tiny iPod on the treadmill – huzzah!) and I’ve been using the iPod Kindle app when I fly. Read more…