I love the internets with all of my heart, but the person who decided to invent the web based seminar (Webinar! How witty we are!) is truly the devil in my book.
Theoretically, I suppose, they cold be interesting and informative, but in reality they tend to go off the boredom meter, and I get about 1 minute of useful information for every 30 minutes of my life wasted.
The upside is that when you are so bored you want to bang your head on the desk you CAN.
The bad part is when you are that bored you want to be anywhere other than on the computer and phone, but you know that if you start to wander THAT will be when the useful bit of information arrives and all will be lost.
That's one place where the federal government has it right. I used to have to do a LOT of the seminars in the last job, but the interface software had pause and rewind buttons, and closed captions, so when you were so bored you thought you might puke you could get up and stretch your legs, go get a cup of coffee, then come back. You risked not being "live" for the Q&A, but there were never any Qs I wanted Aed, so I rolled with it.
Pardon me, I have to go scrape my brain off the floor now.
Amen to that. A classic example of the triumph of technology over common sense.
Posted by: Greg | 24 April 2007 at 04:39 PM
Next time, play some Buzzword Bingo!
http://isd.usc.edu/~karl/Bingo/
You can pay attention to the meeting and mock its participants at the same time!
Posted by: tommyspoon | 25 April 2007 at 04:58 AM
Oh, Lord, yes. I've gotten about 15 minutes of good ideas from hours and hours of webinars... much worse than in-person meetings.
Although it's better than all the "salespitches" I've sat through which are just some flunky reading the corporate PowerPoint. That's basically just a 3-D webinar. ;-)
Posted by: Joe | 25 April 2007 at 05:05 AM