Saturday, May 27, 2006

Is the medium the message?

Sxip is bragging about the download popularity of Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 presentation.

I love Dick's presentation, it's been a breath of fresh air in the stagnant swamp of bulleted Powerpoint (or Open Office) decks we live in. Importantly, I'm sure it's made many others either revisit old decks and consider how they might be spiced up or motivate them to try a different approach in new presentations.

It had that effect on me, I experimented with the Takahashi (not Lessig) method of deck development for two different presentations - a Liberty People Service Webcast and another on the connection between federated identity and ID-Theft. Neither had the ooomph or pizzaz of Dick's (nor the resultant popularity) but it was fun to try something new.

Almost a quarter of a million downloads - impressive. And that's not even counting the widespread P2P sharing that I'm sure is prevalent.

But, given the novelty of the style, and the liklihood that some people are downloading and viewing out of curiousity about that style (rather than an interest in identity, I know I forwarded the link to non-identity friends/colleagues) - I wonder if downloads is the best metric for the impact of the Identity 2.0 deck?

Maybe a histogram of daily seaches on 'identity claim' or 'Gastown' from before and after Dick's OSCON session? (I expect a plot of 'Canadian Dick' would be skewed by this year's election.)

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