Don’t call me DOM

I am by no mean good at making graphics, but I very much like the idea of turning complex ideas into easier-to-grasp graphics.

As I was invited to talk about “Web 2.0” a month ago at the WITFOR conference, I wanted to use a graphic that would illustrate Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 in 7 points.

I started to look for existing illustrations that I could re-use, but while there are many illustrations of what Web 2.0 is in general, I didn’t find any that focused on Tim’s “official” definition; since a big part of the message I wanted to convey was that Web 2.0 was not (only) a buzzword but was actually a fairly well-defined concept, I couldn’t just re-use any of these vague illustrations.  Read more... (197 words, 4 images, estimated 47 secs reading time)

I gave a couple of talks over the past month, where I chose not to use the W3C-traditional HTML-based slides (using Slidy), but instead to use a more graphical approach, using two different tools:

• Prezi, a Flash-based commercial tool that I used for a presentation I gave on Web 2.0 and beyond
• JessyInk, an open-source extension to the open-source SVG editor InkScape, with which I built the presentation I gave on W3C and the Social Web.

I’m summarizing below my experiences with both these tools.

Prezi

Prezi is a Flash-based tool, that allows both to build and show 2D-presentations.  Read more... (1384 words, estimated 5:32 mins reading time)