Jason is right. You shouldn’t say that. It makes people begin to wonder why they paid the ticket price. But I am going to take it one step further. Be well prepared for public speaking. That is the bottom line.

I don’t care if you have slides, fancy transitions, some sort of video or audio portion of your presentation, or even bring props like Carrot Top. Your presentation style is completely up to you. The point is that you should be well prepared to speak on the topic that you said you’d speak on and that people paid for you to speak on. If that means that you simply wing it because you’ll be discussing something that you live everyday, that’s fine. But be well prepared to wing it.

I tried to prepare very well for my recent LessConf presentation (whether it was obvious or not) and I hope the audience never questioned their reasons for attending the conference. When the video comes out, you can be judge for yourself but you can’t say I didn’t try.

Via Dan Benjamin.

After the conference Ryan Carson, founder of Carsonified, told the attendees they’d make the video available online for free to all attendees because of some of the presentations issues they had.  Turns out the weather was beautiful in New York City and, because of the sunlight shining through the Javits Center, it was hard to see the presentations on screen.  I asked Ryan if we could share it through Viddler in a private way to attendees and he said “Absolutely.”

Long story short, for the first time ever this video is now available to the public whether or not you attended the conference.  And don’t think because these presentations were done in November of 2007 that they aren’t just as valuable today as they were then.  I just watched them all again, as every one did a great job.

Some of the presenters from The Future of Web Design were Joshua Davis, Ryan Signer of 37signals, Jeffery Zeldman, Andy Clarke, Josh Williams, Brian Fling, Jonanthan Snook, Elliot Jay Stocks, Lea Alcantara, Ryan Sims and D. Keith Robinson, Jina Bolton, Cindy Li, and Matthew Patterson.

So here you go, one place to watch all of the video, download the slides, and download the audio from these presentations.  This just saved you $150USD!  Also, watch the Future of Web Design’s Viddler account, as I think there will be much more to see there in the future.

Source: The Future of Web Design, New York 2007 videos.