Is it just me, or are most slide decks completely useless without the speaker talking over them. Especially the ones with random lol cats.
Most of the time these slides are not provided with any context, or are random code bits in languages that the reader might not be familiar with.
The rare times when a slide deck is complete and useful, I'm left wondering why it's not just a blog post.
The tools for recording a complete presentation are there, and if you have a macbook, you need nothing else.
Is this a lack of knowledge of how to do this? Should someone write up a howto?
I think the primary audience is usually people that attended the talk so that they could look over the slides later (at least, that's what I've done with my conference slides).
I agree with you, though -- I wish more conferences would allow speakers to simply upload video to YouTube. A lot of of the time the conferences have DVD sales a few months down the line and want you to buy the video of the talks instead of watching them online for free.