I’ve made a concerted effort to improve as a speaker over the last year and a half or so, and have relied heavily on some great websites and books in the process. Without making claims as to the current quality of my presentations, I would like to offer up one tool that I’ve been using when I work on slides: Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos. Great photos can improve almost any presentation, and the abundance of usable content on Flickr is simply amazing. It can be a pain to find just the right photo (with just the right license), however—to find CC photos, you have to click on Search, then on Advanced Search, enter your search terms, and scroll all the way down the page and check the appropriate boxes.
For a while, I used a bookmarklet to avoid that—but with the release of Mozilla’s Ubiquity, I now have an even better tool. If you’ve got Ubiquity installed, check this out. Once you’ve subscribed to the command, you can activate Ubiquity and type
flickr-cc [term]
to quickly and easily find the CC-licensed photos you want.
This command is a lightly-modified version of the Flickr command built in to Ubiquity, and is obviously further modifiable (adding an optional argument to specify the license, for instance). As it stands, though, it’s a pretty easy way to enliven your deck—give it a try!