If you are hunting for best poster award or want to impress the audience with your presentation at a conference, graphs, charts and diagrams can be a key asset. In contrast to this, my experience from conferences has shown that presenters pay almost no attention how to communicate and visualise their research results. Therefore this post shall introduce you to some amazing but uncommon charts and diagrams and discuss some aspects to consider for creating amazing visual presentations.
October and November brought me’kono a further boost in visitors and pages views, which increased by 105% (to 1,028) and 99% (to 2,143). During the period of consideration we had 159 conferences listed and 46 deadlines expired. me’kono could help to channel 58 submissions and registrations to these events—an increase of 107%. Our plattform showed 84 People the way to the right conference, up by 155%. So if you want to increase traffic and engagement for your conference, register today!
These are whopping figures and gives us extra motivation to better the me’kono conference plattform further. Hope, you saw our new sharing buttons on top of each conference abstract! Some under-the-hood changes have also been implemented. For instance Google search results will get much better soon, since me’kono pages are pimped with schema.org style microdata. What this means for you, you might ask. Quit simple – your search results will get much more informative and visually appealing. Just check out this one:
In the search results visitors are able to see location, date and description on first glance – much more convenient!
Finally, me’kono has now its own page on Google plus and we are promoting your conferences there as well! For december — besides getting more conferences online — we are preparing some serious website tweaks and some new year’s surprises. So stay tuned, tell us what you think and check back soon!
me’kono started to kick in and is generating interest in the scientific community. To give you a idea how me’kono is performing, here are some statistics for mid-september to mid-oktober (15.09.11 – 15.10.11) period:
We welcomed 502 unique visitors, how read about 1,079 pages in total. The far largest group of visitors are english speaking (59%) – at least according to their browser request language. The most people came from the United States, although here the differences are very small (US: 10.5%, IN: 9.8%, UK: 6.4%).
What could be more important for conference organisors sighting up with me’kono are figures regarding submission and registration: from the 502 unique visitors, 33 went for additional information to the conference pages linked, 13 registered to the conference and 15 submitted either an abstract or a full paper. After considering the bounce rate, this means that about 1/3 of our visitors to a page actually engage in some manner with the enlisted conference.
And yes, I almost forgot it: by 15 October, me’kono had 112 upcoming conferences listed – and we are adding more day by day!
Just recently I came across an amazing new webservice to be found at http://jpegmini.com. You simply upload your jpeg images and can download them after a short time, having them shrinked by up to factor 8. For people running websites with large background images or your personal cloud storage this is amazing! Loadtimes are dropping considerably and you can stuff more images into the same webspace. This service helps you save money and time – and it’s all for free!
Ok, so far this is really useful. But how about shrinking bulky Powerpoint presentations? With some effort and creativity it is absolutely no problem to create a decent presentation of 30 slides weighing in a hefty 5-10 MB. And then your conference host asks you to upload your file onto the university’s server / send it him per email. Will a combination of JPEGmini and Powerpoint help?
To cut it short: No! Powerpoint simply doesn’t care about image sizes and resolution. We tested it with the following setup: took John Picken’s beautiful image from Lake Como from jpegmini website and embedded into a Powerpoint in full size (about 6 MB) and the optimised version (about 1 MB) at a resolution of 3705 x 2829. The result was two files with exactly the same size of about 600KB. After exporting the image out of the ppt, it was clear what happened: Powerpoint simply shrunk the image both times to 974 x 774 (99 KB)!
To conclude, JPEGmini wount help you reducing presentation file sizes. And! Powerpoint is not suitable for large screen presentations – so no HD or similar output!
August passed by fast, but the crew at me’kono did not waste too much time: we are now listing more than 100 academic entities and research institutions! – and most of them organise a conference. So plenty of choice already here!
The 100th institution happened to be the University of Porto or ‚Universidade do Porto‘. Although not the oldest, it is the largest and best ranking university in Portugal. R&D seems quite fruitful since the university’s members are responsble for 20 % of all Portugiese papers published. By coincidence the Universidade do Porto celebrated 100th birthday this year – so congrats to you guys! Porto is a beautiful city with lots of history, a unique atmosphere and of course the great desert wine is produced there. So, definitely worth a visit.
What else happened in the mean time? After releasing the first version of the plattform me’kono some bugs and misconceptions are removed now and i hope the website got more userfriendly. We especially focused on enhancing the locations section. We hope you like it.
At the moment some internal optimisations are the main focus. And, at the end of September we will introduce some new features for the conference pages. So stay tuned & any feedback very much welcome!
Kjell
Me’kono is finally online! And we are already listing 50 conferences and research events with facts to location, organisors and deadlines. Milestone #50 was set by the SAANZ Annual Conference entitled „Looking Forward: Trends, Horizons and Utopias“ organised by the School of Social and Cultural Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
At the moment me’kono is just a conference database with an ever increasing number of entries. But we have more comming. And all conference submitters will profit from these new services. So, submit your conference or research event and start promoting it using me’kono pages.
It is time to announce our existence. mé’kono is in development and has reached private beta status. Friends and foes of us are testing the upcoming first release of the mé’kono conference platform and we hope to deliver it to the general public soon.
So stay tuned!
Greetings from sunny Vienna,
Kjell