A Wider Net

Slidecasting, an elegantly simple method of synchronizing a slide show to an audio file using tools from Slideshare, is the latest in an overabundant array of online slide presentation tools. Now you have more flavors of online PowerPoint presentations than there are flavors of toothpaste at the local supermarket. You’ve got your plain paste, minty gel, tartar control, tartar control gel, tartar control whitening, tartar control whitening gel, tartar control whitening breath-freshening enamel-strengthening paste, tartar control whitening baking soda gingivitis breath-freshing sensitivity spicy cinnamon sparkle pearl, and all natural organic sand mixed with milkweed ooze. Multiply that times the number of brands and you have a full aisle of tubes that all say “do not swallow.”

Oh, wait - this is about PowerPoint presentations. So, like toothpaste, there are loads of options. You have your slide shows, your animated slide shows, and your animated flash embeddable slide shows. You have your slide shows with audio, your slide shows with video, and your slide shows with video, flash animations, Q&A, polling, downloadable white papers, quizzes, interactive games, and audience sleepiness sensors that alert the speaker to be less boring. And then you have degrees of slide show psychosis - presenters who try to use slides as book pages and ask us to read while they talk - a truly annoying form of multitasking.

So, if it isn’t obvious, I’m a little skeptical at yet another me-too slide show tool. In fact, I’m VERY skeptical at another tool coming from Slideshare - a site I never understood. People upload PowerPoint presentations - WITHOUT the audio. I suppose you could design a slide show that stands alone, but most of the presentations I saw on Slideshare were slide stacks from presentations that needed the audio from the presentation to make sense.

But Slidecasting from Slideshare isn’t bad at all. They have created an elegant tool, and a nice embeddable slide show player to go with it. Plus, the community at Slideshare makes it easy for anyone to store and share presentations. This is actually what Podcasting on the iPod should have been. Surprisingly, they do not have a way to export a Slidecast to a video iPod for a Splodcast.

If you have a need for a little multimedia on your blog or if you have some simple presentations you want to archive and distribute, you may give this tool a try. As a sample, see below. I would say this tool is roughly the slide show equivalent of Crest Whitening Expressions Tartar Control Lemon Ice.

Thanks to Gogi for tipping me off to Slideshare