I have been reading Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen blog even before the first book came out. Getting Presentation Zen (The Book) was just the next logical step, since it provides all that useful information you can find on the website in a structured, readable, and easily accessible way. Four years and another two books (Presentation Zen Design and The Naked Presenter) later, there is now a second edition of the original Presentation Zen book. What can we expect from it?

I've carried around this idea about a presentation demonstrating what's wrong with bullet points in my virtual back pocket for a while now. But where exactly would you give such a presentation? I thought about making it a lightning talk, which are now common at regular conferences. But even then you'd risk alienating many of the other speakers when you tell them - even light-heartedly - that their presentation style just plain sucks.

And then Barcamp Stuttgart 4 came along, and with its "anything goes" attitude, it was now or never. An unconference is a good place to pull off something like that. And even if I were to step on a few people's toes, it's less of a problem than at a conference with lots of full-time speakers ...

So here's the content of that presentation (which I deliberately did not put up on Slideshare, since the slides need some explanation):

At the end of a presentation, there's usually the question: Any questions? And more often than not, it's followed by - awkward silence.

Now, that doesn't mean that the audience doesn't have any questions. For some reason, people just seem to need a moment to muster up the courage to actually ask a question. So if you're a speaker and you encounter said silence - what can you do? Here's a little trick I learned at a recent conference: