Blog as presentation

Any of you on the chemoinformatics circuit knows Wendy Warr – present all at meetings – knows everybody and is tireless in communicating news to the community – formally and informally. She has also been the highly respected and tireless editor of the the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (sic), once JCICS and before that J.Chem.Doc. Wendy writes up all informatics talks at the ACS and other meetings. She naturally asks people for their “slides” – normally in powerpoint form.
My problem has been that I don’t have powerpoint slides (I don’t believe in them and in a later post I’ll tell you why). Up till now I have created my material in a single vast hyperslide (using XHTML) where there are ca 1000 individual slides and I create a rough serial menu of what I might cover. In principle I could click on slide 1, then slide 2, etc until slide 125. By then the audience would have gone home – so I select slides that I think the audience might like and show them.
When Wendy asks for the slides I am embarrassed because I can’t easily give a nice single chunk of information. This is partly because the W3C still hasn’t managed to convince browser manufacturers to “save as hyperdocument”. Handing over a directory structure of 100 files and 100 subdirectories and saying “I showed some of these ” also isn’t much use. So normally Wendy is reduced to something like “PMR spoke in an animated fashion on markuplanguages/openAccess/whatever and showed some demos”. This isn’t much use to readers.
So I’m trying something new. I will write beforehand what I am going to say. I may say bits of it, and I won’t say others. But at least it should make a story, if not a historical record. Then I might something afterwards that says 2I said something different from what I said I was going to say”.
So the next few posts are parts of what I might say at the ACS. Hopefully they are of some general interest in science and information as well.