Rise up and rebel against the presenters who oppress you! Join the Anti-PowerPoint Party, a grass-roots global movement dreamed up by Swiss software engineer and author Matthias Poehm. Be sure to check out his “Horror slide of the month”! You can “Like” the APPP Party on Facebook, too.

Columnist Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times wrote about the APPP in her column, “Anti-PowerPoint revolutionaries unite”. (The FT makes you register to read their stuff, but it is free.) She was brave to admit publicly she’d been “gang raped by PowerPoint slides more times than I can count.” I can’t wait for her podcast of that one.

Joining the APPP is free. And very much tongue-in-cheek. I joined. I’d send money, too, but it’s not quite clear how it would be used. Matthias is flogging his book, The PowerPoint Fallacy, for SGD 29.00 if you join the APPP, SGD 46.00 if you don’t. His marketing strategy is positively a work of genius, in my view, because so many bad presentations waste so many people’s time, all over the world.

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln dedicated a Civil War cemetery in three minutes and just 268 words – and no slides – in his famous Gettysburg Address. 150 years later, American school children can still recite it from memory (I learned it in the 4th grade). Here’s Google’s Director of Research Peter Norvig‘s satirical version of that Gettysburg Address  as a Powerpoint presentation. Point: bad slides detract from good content.  Read more... (375 words, 1 image, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

The World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM) is the leading global gathering for emergency professionals from the public and private sectors. The speakers are from all over the world. The networking opportunities are tremendous; 1,800 attendees are expected next year. And Toronto is a spectacular place to visit in the summer.

The theme of the 18^th WCDM from June 15-18, 2008 is “Resiliency – Individual, Community and Business.” If you live in Asia, and you work in emergency response or management, business continuity, risk management, security, disaster recovery or crisis management, WCDM is an opportunity to share what you’ve learned by making a presentation.

Submit your presentation idea by December 2, 2007. You can submit your proposal online: write up to 250 words to describe your presentation, then click on “Call For Papers.”