Read at Work — Clever, Clever, Clever!

Thanks to a Twitter from Jill O’Neill, I was introduced to a very clever little gimmick that turns out to be more than a gimmick. Read at Work is a parody of Windows that buries poems, novels, and satires in mock-PowerPoint presentations so that you can read at work without being perceived as reading at work. From a distance, it looks like you’re reviewing a typical business PowerPoint presentation, but in fact, you’re reading Emily Dickinson or T.S. Eliot.

Because the notion originated in New Zealand, not everything works outside that country. I found the Emily Dickinson and F. Scott Fitzgerald items sometimes worked. Find one that does, and you’ll see why this tickled both me and Jill with its cleverness. It also shows that there are more ways to use our electronic tools than merely shoveling content into HTML.