I took the day off sick. Somehow I contracted food poisoning and felt too weak to hit the office. So I spent most of the day reading through my Bloglines feeds. One feed lead to some Google videos. Another to Yahoo videos. All of these were technical presentations with a person talking in front a screen. On the screen is some 40+ page powerpoint for the benefit of the actual audience. Normally these videos are produced by individuals. But in the case of the technical videos they are normally created by the Google and Yahoo technical departments. I’ve had a few observations and frustrations about these presentations.

• Show a show of the full slide from the screen. Don’t just move the camera and assume the video user can read the type. Provide an inline view of the PPT slide. Yahoo has done this on some of the DOM/JavaScript videos.
• Have microphones in the audience for questions. Many times you can see the presenter point to someone and say something like ‘yes, you have a question…’. On the video you never hear the question on the response.
• Most of the videos provide a tremendous amount of links to other references. As there is no way to scrape these from the video add the ability to download the support material from a link.