Smylers’ “Beginners guide to talking at conferences”

I ran in to Smylers' Talking at Conferences: A Beginners' Guide the other day. It's a very useful distillation of things you should consider if you're thinking of giving a talk at a technical conference, such as YAPC Europe 2007, where the talk was delivered.

One recommendation in particular struck me, in re ordering the material in a presentation effectively.

But there is one metric which can be applied to a talk safe in the knowledge that following it would have taken exactly the same preparation time: would the talk have been better had exactly the same content been presented but in the reverse order.

I'll be keeping that in mind next time I have to present something.