Nephari

Damn, these women = BAD ASS! I can barely walk in anything but a 2" wedge...

Also ladies, did you know you can take surfing lessons in Ballard? It's true!

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Is Facebook embarrassed to tell you how many people look at your cat or kid pictures?

Yes, says BuzzFeed writer Charlie Warzel. No way, says a Facebook engineer — we just don’t think regular people care about this stuff.

Here’s Facebook News Feed manager Lars Backstrom’s response to Warzel’s piece.* I approach Facebook PR very warily, but it’s entirely possible that Backstrom’s argument — if Facebook thought (normal) people wanted to see how many “views” they were racking up with their updates, Facebook would do it — is the truth, or something close to it.

But what Backstrom doesn’t do is respond to the much more interesting part of the BuzzFeed piece. That’s the part where Warzel reports on a Stanford research project that argues that most Facebook users consistently underestimate the size of the audience for their posts, by a factor of three or four.

One key theory proposed by the paper’s authors: Just because none of your pals are commenting on, liking or sharing something you wanted them to see doesn’t mean they didn’t see it. It’s entirely possible that they saw it, and didn’t care.

And it turns out that Backstrom didn’t respond to that part of Warzel’s post for a good reason. His company participated in the Stanford study — it provided Facebook log data for the research — and he’s generally okay with its results and conclusions.

“Most people are not doing a great job of estimating the size of their audience,” he says. “It’s fine that most people don’t have a sophisticated understanding of who’s seeing their posts.”

This argument doesn’t apply to users who have some sort of professional reason for people to see their stuff. Like advertisers, for instance. Or George Takei and his team of interns and freelance ghostwriters. Or Nick Bilton. That’s a different issue.

But if you’re a regular human who posts a photo of your adorable toddler, and no one has anything to say about it, don’t assume no one saw it. But do feel free to guess why they didn’t say anything.

* Nice cap-feather for BuzzFeed: They got Facebook to pen a response to one of their posts — just like they did to the New York Times!

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Wavebreakmedia)

Just like a dog is a man’s best friend, a cake is a woman’s, right? Getting us through the good days and the bad days (and all the days in between), a sickly-sweet cupcake can be just the pick-me-up that we all need. In light of that law, welcome the new bakery pop-up, The Depressed Cake Shop — where you will leave with a smile and a sugar high.

The Depressed Cake Shop was set up to raise awareness about depression, as well as much needed monies for mental health issues. The pop-up bakery is touring the U.K. throughout August and will be selling a selection of grey cakes. That’s right, we said grey — but that’s all part of the point. Speaking out about the concept, Creative Director Master Baker, Emma Thomas, says, “The grey-scale colour scheme of the cakes is in part to represent the hopeless grey feeling of depression.” Coming as a sequel to last year’s "Eat Your Heart Out cupcakes" and "STI cakes" (no, really), expect weird and wonderful things. Thomas adds, “‘Except the grey exterior, I didn’t want to restrict how people could express themselves.” (Daily Mail)


Photo: Via Daily Mail

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Advances in medical care these days are progressing so rapidly it’s hard to keep track of all the new tech. But when you break a bone there’s still one traditional way of healing it: the plaster cast. It’s cheap and effective from a health care perspective, but for the user it’s cumbersome and often smelly. Jake Evill, a Victoria University of Wellington graduate, may have figured out what the next generation of casts will look like, and they’re actually quite sexy.

His concept is called Cortex, a custom, 3-D printed cast that would allow the wearer to have more freedom while their bones mend. As you can see int he diagram above it’s a pretty straightforward idea that’s been executed rather beautifully. Two questions come to mind when I look at this though: Would the material be strong enough to support and protect the broken limb, and how the hell do you get it off? Even so, it’s an incredibly strong concept, and if I break my arm some time in the next 10 years, I hope that this is a viable option.

How many times have you heard the phrase, "PowerPoint sucks!" or "slides kill presentations?"

Here's something to think about as you head into the weekend: PowerPoint doesn't suck. You suck. Sorry. I don't mean "you" (the person reading this blog post... I mean after all, for all I know you could well be one of the smartest people in the world), but the person who is speaking/presenting/attempting to captivate a crowd and is using way too much slide presentation software without understanding their content at all... they suck. True story: I was speaking at a board meeting several months ago. It was a small event in a very exclusive hotel. The audio/video set-up was two brand-new, fifty inch TV monitors for an intimate group of twenty executives. I plugged my MacBook air directly into these two televisions that were attached by a splitter. I ran through some of my slides during the allotted set-up time. Also in the room were the most senior communications and marketing executives from the company, to ensure that everything was being set-up just right. As I clicked through my slides, one of them asked: "what technology are you using to show your slides?"  My response was: "ummm, that's PowerPoint." They looked at each other and burst out laughing. "That's NOT how we use PowerPoint," they said.

It's not PowerPoint. It's you.

The reason people use so many headings and bulletpoints is because:

1. They don't know their content.
2. They don't know how to design a presentation.
3. They don't know how to tell a story.
4. They're worried that they are going to forget something.

It runs deeper.

If you really want to better understand how to create a more compelling presentation and how to design it, folks like Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, Nick Morgan and Peter Coughter can best help you deep-dive well beyond the skimming of this blog post. The point is this: don't let bad presentations of the past dictate the presentation that you have to give tomorrow. PowerPoint, Keynote and the like are blank canvasses. You can put on them whatever you want. That being said, whatever you do put on a slide is not the content. At all. Whatever you put on the slide is simply a way to reinforce whatever it is that is coming out of your mouth. Your presentation is not your slides. Your presentation is not your technology. Your presentation is not the words or images on a screen. Your presentation is your ability to distill the information between your ears into a format that tells a simple, educational and entertaining story to your audience.

Here's what you must do:

1. Know your content inside and out. When the slides fail (and something always fails), it should have no bearing on you or the story you tell.
2. If you don't know how to create a story arc, find/hire someone who can help you formulate a strategy and structure.
3. Learn how to tell your story. What is the beginning, the middle and the end? What is the one thing (or two) that everyone should know after it's all said and done?
4. Don't worry about forgetting certain parts. If you know the greater story, the details do work out.
5. Practice, rehearse and know your content (yes, it bears repeating).

Don't let the slides suck.

Inevitably, someone will tell you that they would like a copy of the presentation or that the presentation should also be some kind of leave-behind. Don't fall for that. It's a myth. If you have to leave something behind, don't let it be your slides. Leave the audience with speaking notes or a more formal deck, but not the slides. Why? The slides should only be a small component of the story. In fact, I would argue that the best presentations in the world are the ones where the slides are completely meaningless unless you have seen the speaker present them. Focus on that. Ensure that your slides act as a visual enhancement to everything that you're saying. Why? Because if they don't, it means that there was never a need to have the presenters there in the first place, because everything was self-evident from the words on the slides.

That would be a shame.

BONUS! Here's a hilarious little story about Steve Jobs from Apple and his desire to become a better storyteller from Business Insider: Here's An Awesome Story About Steve Jobs Telling An Employee He's Going To Become The World's Best Story Teller In 1994.

Tags: apple blog blog post board meeting business insider captivate a crowd content garr reynolds keynote macbook air nancy duarte nick morgan peter coughter powerpoint presentation presentation design presentation skills presenter presenting slide presentation software speaker speaking steve jobs storyteller storytelling technology visual enhancement

The post Hasta La Alta Vista, Baby. appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

I just saw the news that Yahoo! is “sunsetting” Alta Vista, one of the first “good” search engines. This makes me a little misty, as Alta Vista was the search engine I used BG – Before Google – and it had a real shot at *being* Google, had its various owners not utterly screwed it up over the years. Did you know, for example, that at one point Alta Vista was the largest and most widely used search tool on the web? Its driving force, Lois Monier, once told me “search should be a pencil” – he was adamant that Alta Vista not become a portal.

But Alta Vista was owned by DEC, a now dead computer company, which was bought by Compaq, another now dead computer company. And they made it a portal. And through the now defunct Overture, the assets of Alta Vista made their way to Yahoo!, a still alive portal. But now, Alta Vista is going to truly be dead.

It’s hard to watch an important player in the early Internet go away – and it makes me reflect on a couple of things. First, how much or our own culture and history we’re losing day by day, even despite the best efforts of archivists like Brewster Kahle. And secondly, on a personal note, Alta Vista was the search engine that helped me find my birth mother way back in 1995, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, and my life-long wonderings as an adoptee took on a new urgency. Alta Vista pointed me to an online forum for people like me, and there I found a person who helped me find my mother. Pretty cool.

So I’ll miss you, Alta Vista. And if any of you want to know the engine’s journey, well, there’s a book for that.

The post Hasta La Alta Vista, Baby. appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

Google has quietly dropped another search operator, the tilde (i.e. ~) search operator. Google Operating System blog noticed the lack of support for the tilde operator over the weekend. Reportedly, Dan Russell, a Search Research Scientist at Google, confirmed Google dropped the feature. Dan said...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Oh, the times. They have changed! They have changed so much that today, those of us who grew up with The Magic School Bus (if you're not one of them, a solemn lamentation is in order) will have our lives turned upside down by the inevitable: Sexy, grown-up Magic School Bus character art. We knew we should've stayed home today!

Everyone's favorite science nerds are in their early 20s now, and while we're sure they still care a lot about book smarts (the Frizz's wise words don't fade that easily), they are also interested in things like carefully-placed hats, fashionable thick-rimmed glasses, and scarves. Heck, even Ms. Frizzle gets an update in this brilliant artwork by the Tumblr-ific artist Celeste. And you know what? Everyone looks pretty hot. There, we said it.

Check out a few images here, and if you're dying for more (you know you are), get your fix on Buzzfeed.

View the slideshow