Last week I posted some thoughts about what we need to do about bad PowerPoint presentations in response to a posting by Mickie Rops at her Association Knowledge and Credentialing blog. For those involved in education or conference-related activities at their association the problem is particularly acute. We have conferences, congresses, symposiums, seminars, and countless other opportunities where there are individuals in front of a crowd of people tasked with sharing their knowledge, experience and expertise. And while every association has their own nuances and intricacies that make them unique, the one thing that is pretty common throughout is the fact that most, if not all, provide their presenters with a computer, projector and PowerPoint to make their presentations.

Mickie being a well known innovator and educator in the association community obviously decided that the feedback she received was loud and clear. Today she did a follow-up posting: Powerpointless that consisted of a summary of the comments she recieved and a pretty cool call to action. She suggested that we not only needed to share good practices and ideas for coaching and preparing presenters from associations that were doing a good job of it, but also that perhaps we needed to educate ourselves as well. The suggested medium: a virtual book club where we could pick a few relevant titles and share our combined learning. Now this isn’t a new concept by any stretch, but it is a great approach to solving a common problem many of us are facing.

This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about blogging, and the whole social media phenomena in the first place. It not only allows you the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas very easily and also connect with people you wouldn’t have the opportunity to normally, but it also, if done properly, allows you to connect with these same people to solve problems that you would have otherwise faced alone. This is an example of social media done right, and while this also happens pretty often, it’s one of the benefits that can be easily lost in the hype.

As an adjunct to the discussion I wanted to say thanks to Lisa Junker for suggesting the resources that she did. One piece in particular: Really Bad Powerpoint by Seth Godin, proved to be a quick and enlightening read. It just so happens that Seth just updated it at the beginning of the year in response to the abundance of bad presentations, presentation templates and presentation practices still floating around. If you have a few minutes, follow the link above, it really is a worthwhile read.

Until recently, text messaging or more accurately SMS, was primarily the territory of teens (the Internet Generation) and twenty-somethings (Generation Y). There are exceptions to this generational generalization (here also), but for all intents and purposes those who are using it either belong to the groups referenced previously or been among a group of early adopters, interested in the implications of new methods and manners of communication and collaboration.

Thanks to tools like Twitter, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Pownce, blabto, and Kadoink, texting has gone from a phenomenon of the few to a communications method of the many. The Association Bloggers (largely comprised of Gen-Xers) demonstrated this in the txtmob backchannel experiment at the ASAE Annual Conference this year in Chicago. Text messaging could be used for true collaboration and almost real-time information exchange. I was among those that used texting for strictly utilitarian purposes until this experiment, but now I use it for a myriad of purposes, not least of which is staying connected to many new friends and colleagues that I met through or at the conference.

Further evidence that text messaging has reached, or moved beyond, the Tipping Point, was offered this past Sunday, when Yahoo! announced that SMS capability would be integrated into its Yahoo! Mail application as part of a larger overhaul, in an attempt to make it “more of a social application.

So know that we know, or at least have more proof, that texting is here to stay and has many practical applications beyond the most obvious, the bigger question becomes how do we leverage it in the association world to connect associations to our members and our members to each other? What steps do we have to take to make sure that it’s used effectively to create or derive additional member value? Many questions, no doubt, but many great opportunities as well.

Update: Thanks to a comment from Lisa Junker, I remembered that I actually had planned on sharing some great examples of how different industries are using Twitter. This list is not all-inclusive so feel free to add your own in the comments.

• Reporting
• Business
• Higher Education
• Productivity
• Affiliate Marketing
• Professional
• Marketing
• Using it for Good
• Life Saving
• Other Ideas: Here and Here

Mark Cuban posted a blog entry on Friday (thanks Techcrunch for the tip) discussing (perhaps defending) his comments regarding why he feels that the “Internet is Dead and Boring“, which has caused quite a stir. He states:

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

That’s not to say the impact of the Internet on the entire planet hasn’t been off the charts. It has been. It has changed the lives of billions of people and it will continue to be a utility to billions of people. Just like cars, TVs, Radio, Planes, Highways, you get the point.

Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn’t the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded)

Now anyone who is familiar with Mark Cuban knows that he is: (a) smart, (b) tells it as he sees it and (c) not afraid of controversy. His posting is poignant and his argument is salient and logical. That’s not a bad thing and I know he wasn’t trying to downplay the significance of the transformation from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, but rather uses it to justify his rationale and start a dialogue. He is also clear to point out that services like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are not the “Internet” but rather applications that run on the Internet.

Despite the compelling argument Cuban puts forward, I’m not sure that I would agree with his absolutist perspective. I think the innovation and introduction of new tools, services and applications that meet previously unmet / unknown needs has slowed down considerably, but I think that the Internet is far from boring and even farther from dead. For some reason, I don’t think I’m alone in that opinion.

A recent posting on Read/Write Web by Alex Iskold titled “The Digestion Phase: How We Got Here And Where We Are Going Next” suggests that because the Internet and technological innovation/development in general, like many other things, are cyclical we have simply entered a cooling-off period, or as he calls it a “Digestion Phase”. In justifying his position Iskold offers that:

…a digestion phase is a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together. It is the outcome of this phase that will decide if we continue to slide or if we rebound and start climbing back up. The deciding factor will be the true value of the technologies that we created.

He goes on to describe the evolution and transformation from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and how the shift was driven by a few key advancements: broadband, blogs, ajax and social networking. He also suggests that we are simply in a clean-up period where companies, organizations and individuals are now stopping to take a look at/reflect on what works and what doesn’t and what can be done to fix it without changing its core purpose, or as Martin Fowler calls it: refactoring.

The digestion phase gives companies a great chance to improve their services. These improvements may include performance and scalability changes, user interface enhancements, the creation of an API, and compliance with standards. This is the time to simplify and to remove things that are not needed.

He closes the article by suggesting that there is no shortage of ideas just the ability to make use of them. And thanks to the pace of technological development, these cooling off periods will get shorter and shorter, especially as we grow accustomed to accepting and embracing rapidly changing technologies.

I tend to think that Iskold has it more right that Cuban, and while it may be seen by some as a boring period, I am happy that things have cooled off enough that I can catch my breath, make sense of everything that has happened over the past few years and get ready for the next wave of breakthroughs that is surely lying in wait.