I'll be off for the next little while, conferencing in Pittsburgh at the Technology in the Arts conference at CMU over the weekend, then on a much-delayed vacation in NYC.

I finally polished my Powerpoint presentation (on using blogs, photosharing and social networking sites in nonprofit communications) to a fine sheen last night in a sudden surge of inspiration and creativity, and am satisfied enough with the result that I can enjoy myself away in the world without any work-related sleepless nights.

I will admit that I was, tragically, well on my way to creating a rather drab and sad little series of slides until I got some more inspiration from Slideshare, and then sat through the entire hour of the microsoft webinar on the first five slides, by the author of Beyond Bullet Points, Cliff Atkinson.

I ended up not taking the author's advice quite to the letter, but watching that did have a profound effect on the way I visualized the graphics and the tone of the thing.

And, as always happens, it just needed to rattle around in my brain long enough until it was ready to emerge, fully formed, right out of my forehead.

As it happened, I ended poking fun at the "cheerleader for technology" that I sometimes feel like by using a few images like this:

And all right, I might as well come clean, this:

Let's just say that the humor lies not in our shared physical appearance.

And of course I present all the necessary caveats and conditions, so I hold to my promise of not playing cheerleader, and provide instead just a basic introduction to some simple technology.

Now all that's left to do is compile a resources handout, as requested by the conference organizers. Happy to oblige, but I'm thinking about augmenting this with a workshop-specific wiki, just to see what the response is. See if anybody goes and contributes to it. I realize this is hardly groundbreaking, but would certainly be worth the exercise for me alone, at the very least.

And if folks from the workshop don't use it, then at least I'll have another place to play around with nonprofit technology links and news. And post pictures of people who are not me.