Another great nugget in today’s RSS feeds: Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down from Wired magazine. The goal is twenty slides, 20 seconds per slide. It’d make those internal meetings fly, that’s for sure, though I’m not sure it “combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.”

It’s worth clicking through, just to see A Whole New Mind author Dan Pink’s example of Pecha Kucha in action. Plus, his PowerPoint is about the emotional intelligence of signs, which every planner who deals with signage should study, I think.

Cindy Butts is at it again: Check out her 11 Ways to Use Zoomerang–and 14 Tips. Pure gold, and I would say applicable to other online surveying tools as well (I’m partial to Survey Monkey, but that’s probably just because I like the name.

What, you’re not using these free-to-very-cheap online surveying tools to gather evaluations, poll attendees, etc.? Why on earth wouldn’t you?

I was chatting the other day with someone who does a lot of speaking work and who recently gave a presentation at a meeting industry association conference. I mentioned the canned speeches the “thought leaders” at ASAE and The Center’s conference did, and how they were swarmed afterward (the ones I saw, anyway), with planners interested in hiring them for their own meetings.

He brought up a point that I hadn’t thought about before. While we always say we want speakers to customize their presentations to our audiences, the very act of doing that may put them at a disadvantage. For example, this guy said he customized 90 percent of his session to be specific to meeting planners’ issues. But, because meeting planning isn’t his area of expertise, he felt he was shortchanging himself, especially compared to other speakers who barely tweaked their canned speeches. “I lose the opportunity to really showcase my stuff by customizing it totally,” he said.

Which makes me wonder if this holds true outside the meeting planning industry meetings. Do speakers risk losing something when they customize? Do audiences gain more than they lose? I still think customization is vital, but this was a different point of view that hadn’t occurred to me before.