Last fall I went to a digital arts conference in Vienna called Paraflows. I gave a talk about my personal history, and how it led to me getting into the kind of work that I do (Content Strategy, metadata, semantic web). It’s part personal history, but also touches on the cultural experience of my generation, and how I think it contributed to a lot of what we’re doing and seeing on the web today.

I was quite proud of this talk – it was visual, funny, personal and conversational. It was a different kind of presenation than I usually give, and it provided me an opportunity to evolve my speaking style. It wasn’t perfect, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. People had repeatedly suggested that I post the slides on Slideshare, but at the time I could not get speaker notes to disaply, and I didn’t think the talk would make much sense without them.

Well, Slideshare has been working to resolve the mirad issues they were having with that bit of functionality, and yesterday I got notice that it now works for PowerPoint 2007 presentations. So you can now view my talk, A Personal Journey Towards Datameaningfulness, with speaker notes. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that it’s 97 slides. It’s very visual (and you don’t have to read the speaker notes if you don’t want to. You can just flip through and look at the amusing pictures).

NOTE: I just realized that, although the speaker notes are showing up, after the first slides they’re all misaligned (the notes from slide 2 onward are from slides about 8 pages down the line). I have no idea how to fix this. In the meantime, people seem to be enjoying the slideshow anyway.