In a recent presentation I attended, the speaker warmed up with a couple of bulleted lists that outlined the agenda of the session before moving onto his third slide that was clearly many days, work of stitching together powerpoint glyphs and figures in a sort of three dimensional loop that attempted to show the progression of software APIs around the evolution of networked computing. It was utterly baffling and the more I stared at it, the more I felt I was looking at some kind of latter day Escher drawing. I gazed around the room and saw most of the other attendees on their laptops distracted by their chat or e-mail clients, however amongst those of us who weren't using the session as down time in their schedule, I saw no-one question the meaning of the figures, or the information it was attempting to convey. The speaker was extremely proud of it however, and lingered on the slide for about twenty minutes as he waved his arms and spoke of REST, ATOM, Ruby, and a plethora of other acronyms that apparently were all part of the Web 2.0 solar system.
