Last year, while I was developing my talks, I saw a bit of bad advice. I didn't recognize it at the time. Instead, I saw it as a goal to reach. The forum was a private one, and I've long forgotten who the players were. But here is a reconstructed, summarized view of what spurred me to try:
elph1120: You know what I love? A speaker who can do an entire talk from one slide.
612kenny: OMG yes. I saw someguy do that at someconference. It was amazeballs.
elph1120: Yeah, more speakers should do that.
gryphon: Totally.
This is bad advice. Don't do this.
Now to explain what happened...
I saw this, and decided to try and do that for my DevOpsDays Minneapolis talk last year. I got close, I needed 4 slides. Which is enough to fit into a tweet.
The key slides from my presentation on Intentional Monitoring #DevOpsDays pic.twitter.com/zjy8gKq0CE
-- SysAdm 1138 (@SysAdm1138) July 20, 2016
See? No link to SlideShare needed! Should be amazing!
It wasn't.
The number one critique I got, by a large, large margin was this:
Wean yourself from the speaker-podium.
In order to do a 4-slide talk, I had to lean pretty hard on speaker-notes. If you're leaning on speaker-notes, you're either tied to the podium or have cue-cards in your hands. Both of these are violations of the modern TED-talk style-guide tech-conferences are following these days. I should have noticed that the people rhapsodizing over one-slide talks were habitues of one of the holdouts of podium-driven talks in the industry.
That said, there is another way to do a speaker-note free talk: the 60-slide deck for a 30 minute talk. Your slides are the notes. So long as you can remember some points to talk about above and beyond what's written on the slides, you're providing value above and beyond the deck you built. The meme-slide laugh inducers provide levity and urge positive feedback. If you're new to speaking this is the style you should be aiming for.
A one-slide talk is PhD level speaking-skills. It means memorizing paragraph by paragraph a 3K word essay, and read it back while on stage and on camera. You should not be trying to reach this bar until you're already whatever about public speaking, and have delivered that talk a bunch of times already.