slidezing
Present - Text - Engage
Today marks the 5th birthday of my blog, practical business python. I started from an idea and have grown it to over 70 articles and receive about 90,000 unique visitors a month. I took the opportunity to write a blog post about the costs associated with the statically hosted blog as well as some thoughts on the content I've produced. If folks are interested in learning more, the full post might be useful.
I realized I wanted to build something that was easy to use for everyone involved. There are other tools out there that provide polling or feedback but they typically require an application or more complex registration process. I realized that the simplest approach would be to allow people to text their comments or questions to a custom cell phone number. That way, no one needs to install anything or learn a new tool. All the presenter needs to do is share their slidezing assigned phone number and present as normal. All texts will get aggregated by the service and can be viewed on a mobile friendly website during or after the presentation.
The other challenge I noticed is that it is really challenging to interact with a large audience. When I present to a group, I want to get feedback and ask questions but that is not feasible when there is a limited amount of time and a large audience.
In addition, it is really hard to understand audience engagement. Do people like the content? Is it too high level or low level? How can I improve my presentation for the next event.
Right now there are not many simple tools to engage with a large audience and get feedback on how to improve.
I am active in my local data science community and really enjoy attending and presenting at these events. During one of these presentations, I noticed how many people were taking pictures of the slides. I personally found it slightly annoying as an audience member and know that it can be distracting to the presenter as well. In addition, the quality of the slides is not good. I thought, there has to be a better way.
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