Self-portrait by Ross McCrae for his sister Tara, Oct. 2011

Rocket by Ross, Oct. 2011

There is a hackneyed list of presentation tips that get repeated ad nauseum if you want to make an effective presentation, but it is odd that they never make it to the web world:

• Reduce the number of words to just a few key ideas. You have limited time to engage the audience.
• Use images. If you have information you want to impart, images will give your ideas deeper meaning by giving them emotional impact. People are more likely to remember what you said if you use a suitable, well-chosen image.

And yet we load up on extraneous stuff and water down our key points. And this for an audience that is not in a room with us, that has to listen to us, but most likely dis-interested and just a mouse click away from the next more interesting thing on the web.

Gawker gives a shoutout to BostonGlobe.com and its new design. I agree.

It’s almost shocking to see a site, especially a site from a large newspaper, that is just so readable. There would have been immense pressure to load up on all the usual widgets and doodads. Every department wants a box for its section on the home page. Instead, someone fought hard to keep the reader’s experience intact.

Feel the white space! Time to breathe.

“We in media think the value is in the content, and it is not, it is in the relationship,” said Jeff Jarvis on This Week in Google.

“I went to lunch with the former president of a big network news corporation and he said: ‘You know, Google and Facebook and all these companies use our steel to make their cars. They don’t value our content.’ And I said ‘No it is the contrary: Mark Zuckerberg values more content than you do. All you value is what you make. You think all you value is encased in your content, and [Mark] sees value in content made by lots of people, and he extracts that value in a different way.’”