The World’s Best Presentations

Lin Hao is the name of the 9 year old boy who, along with Yao Ming, lead the Chinese athletes into the Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

The series of events that resulted in Lin’s position of honor began when his school was destroyed in the massive earthquake that struck China just months before the Olympics.  Out of a class of thirty, twenty of his classmates died.

Lin was fortunate enough to not sustain any life-threatening injuries and freed himself from the rubble. However, instead of escaping from the debris that used to be his classroom, he went deeper in to find his classmates.  He was able to rescue two of them.

He’s 9.

When asked what motivated him to take this course of action, his reply:

“I am leader of the class.  I am a hall monitor.  They are my responsibility.”

We had DVR’d the ceremonies and my wife, who had missed the original broadcast, and I were replaying them Sunday afternoon.

When I tried to tell her the story of Lin, I couldn’t do it without choking up.  Again, me, a self-proclaimed emotional cripple, was crying my eyes out like Jimmy Swaggert during revival week.

What makes this story remarkable for me is that I have seen the pictures of the devastation; piles of rubble that moments before were buildings full of people, hundreds of bodies lying in the street with anguished relatives looking at each one, trying to identify a missing loved one.

The medium that delivered these powerful images was a powerpoint on slidshare.net.   Trust me, I am a news junkie, reading two newspapers a day, one weekly news magazine, and a google reader overloaded with feeds.

Nothing tells a story better than a well-crafted presentation.

Slideshare.net has just completed its annual “World’s Best Presentation Contest”.

I encourage you to take a look.  All of the presentations are outstanding.

Thanks to Rashmi and her team for making this possible.

Sasser