Here’s a surefire recipe for boredom. Take one technical talk. Add PowerPoint slides. Place a speaker on stage. The usual result: nap time, or large doses of caffeine.
But lately I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon. These elements of countless tech presentations have been thrown into the blender of geek culture and emerged as an unlikely new form of entertainment and sport for the tech set.
This past week, I saw the perfect illustration of this when I dropped by an Ignite event at the Santa Clara Convention Center. For the uninitiated, the Ignite concept works like this: Each speaker has five minutes to deliver a talk with 20 PowerPoint slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds.
“If you don’t really like the topic, you can go get a drink,” explained emcee and Ignite creator Brady Forrest as the event kicked off. “It’ll be over before you get back.”
With that introduction, Maile Ohye, a member of Google’s Webmaster support team, bounded on stage and into this strange new realm of presentations.
Her subject: “DateRank,” a way to gauge the potential of potential dates.
Or, as Ohye explained it, “I took my knowledge of PageRank, and combined it with my knowledge of dating.”
Nerdy stuff, that. To understand the humor, you first have to know that PageRank refers to Google’s method of ranking sites that appear when you search.
Fortunately, the audience of 200 people at the Santa Clara Convention Center, who were in town for a search engine marketing conference did, and found the concept hilarious. (Confession: So did I, but I also suspect it’s one of those gags where you had to be there.)
Here’s what intrigued me. Rather than hitting the town, checking out a restaurant or finding some good music for their evening of entertainment, these folks gathered in this room after the convention had ended for the day to listen to Ohye and seven other speakers deliver Ignite talks. And in fact the event was part of Global Ignite Week, which included 50 such events around the world.
The Ignite talks mix humor with serious subjects stoked by the tension of wondering whether the speaker will stay on track with their slides or implode on stage. (Remember there is the time limit. And did I mention alcohol?)
Afterward, I approached Ohye, who was still amped up from the energy of the room. While she had spoken on other mundane topics at panels during the day, doing an Ignite presentation was far more thrilling, she said.
“The feeling up there is amazing,” Ohye said. “It’s my fantasy, in fact, to do standup comedy. And this feels a little like that.”
Forrest, who works at O’Reilly Media planning tech conferences, launched the first Ignite talk back in 2006 in his hometown of Seattle. Since then, they’ve become a phenomenon, with people staging Ignite talks in bars, theaters, conference rooms — any space that can fit a projector, a screen, a few dozen chairs and, ideally, a bar.
“I liken it to giving people a chance to be a rock star,” Brady said. “It forces people to be concise. It’s constraining in a way that they’re able to be creative.”
Of course, this concept of presentation as performance art isn’t new. Apple founder Steve Jobs was a pioneer of this. He knew the value and impact such presentations could have.
But the idea has spread way beyond that now. It is also in some ways a sign of the times. When people are making presentations, they have to compete more than ever for the attention of folks who can tune out at any second to check their e-mail or Twitter accounts. In an era of distraction, we the audience have high expectations for being entertained by the person on stage.
Bronwyn Saglimbeni, who has been working as a speaking and media coach for 15 years in Silicon Valley, finds this evolution to be liberating. And she says the corporate clients she works with are excited by the opportunity to cut loose.
“There is a sense that you’ve got to bring it,” she said. “At work you have to dial back so much of your personality. So people are fired up about the possibility of getting up and having some fun with their content.”
If there was anyone who epitomized this intersection of entertainment and presentations, I figured it would be Heather Gold. From working on the Web and at Apple in the 1990s, Gold has become a full-time comedian and speaker. I’ve seen her perform at comedy clubs, listened to her provocative “The Heather Gold Show” podcast, and watched her present at Web 2.0 conferences.
But Gold is spending part of her time to trying to coach people away from the entertainment model of public speaking. She’s worried that in their attempts to dazzle and amuse, too many people will come across as fake and shallow. Less schtick, she says, and more authenticity.
As I thought through this idea, I called Scott Berkun to get his take. I just finished “Confessions of a Public Speaker,” his new book, which mixes memoir and advice gleaned from his speaking career since leaving Microsoft a few years ago. He, too, had mixed feelings about the presentation entertainment culture, finding it “weird” that people would pay big money to attend a conference, and then choose to watch more talks in the social time.
“I chalk that up to how bad most public speaking is,” Berkun said.
As for me, I’m not worried about being too entertained at conferences. I don’t need every executive to be Robin Williams. But if this saves me from deadly dull keynotes and panels, it will be the kind of innovation I can appreciate for years to come.
Contact Chris O’Brien at 415-298-0207 or cobrien@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/sjcobrien and read his blog posts at www.siliconbeat.com.
DATA AND DATES
Google has its vaunted PageRank algorithm, which ranks Web sites by analyzing links to them to determine their value, relevancy and trustworthiness. Maile Ohye, who works at Google, has “DateRank,” her special algorithm to find Mr. or Ms. Right, which she defines as “an authoritative gauge of coolness to aid relationship seekers.”
Here”s how it works, as she outlined it at a recent Ignite event: Say a friend wants to date a guy who is good friends with Ohye. That”s a “quality inbound link” (in layman”s terms, that means Ohye is a good judge of the guy”s potential). So far, so good “” Mr. Right goes higher up on the rankings as a potential date.
But then, DateRank finds he is friends with Heidi Fleiss. Uh-oh, that lower quality “paid link” is bad news, and down in the rankings he goes.
Of course, he could improve his ranking by gaining better “inbound links,” but he shouldn”t be too obvious about it. Someone who namedrops to impress a potential date is guilty of “keyword stuffing.”