One of the crazy ideas that occurred at South By Southwest this year was the general application of evil to presentations. Not entirely unlike Battledecks (but practical rather than entertaining), the reason behind the idea is threefold.
- Most presentation slides are terrible, and by repeating what the presenter is saying actually distract from rather than add to the presentation
- So replacing slides with random images from Flickr would probably improve most presentations
- Evil is fun
It took a bit of time to get up and running, partly because I wanted to be absolutely scrupulous in how I was using other people's images: they must be public, and must be licensed appropriately. However I'm now happy to announce evilpresentation, a simple tool for creating presentations using the power of Flickr, random number generators, web monkeys, and so forth.
In the process of doing this, I of course had to 'claim' a machine tag namespace: evil: is for evil things. Currently, we just have evil:purpose= for the presentation system, but I'm sure someone will come up with some other evil uses in future. Evil is fun.
Mark Norman Francis and Gareth Rushgrove helped come up with the idea, or at least kept on ordering margaritas with me around; I can't remember which (see above, under margaritas).