SlideShare Rocks My World
SlideShare is a social network-based hosting and sharing service for PowerPoint, Open Office and Keynote presentations. You can upload slideshows of up to 20 Mb, share them with a link or even embed them in your blog. Shows that are already on SlideShare can be tagged and commented on.
I uploaded the slideshow I put together for our recent Stormhoek Jozi Geek Dinner, and have embedded it below:
This is a killer service. The website is soooo user-friendly and intuitive, the login process completely painless and the upload and networking facilities streamlined and slick. Be still my beating heart.
This is more than just an upload and embed tool though. It makes putting slideshows on the web so easy that it may well encourage people to use slideshows, like audio and video, to broadcast a message. SlideCasting. You heard it here first.
I have some invites to the beta if you’re keen to try it out. Mail me.
I agree it within yur own web page.t’s fiendishly easy to use, but I’d still like a tool that doesn’t require the copying and pasting of code in order to display an object in a web page.
Thats a nice term. SlideCasting!
No dude, this is a god-awful service! It encourages people to create slides with too much text. This is what kills presentations everywhere.
Visuals are there to support a speaker. Visuals should thus go nowhere without the speaker that presents them. It’s like sending the ingredients without the chef.
You’re not getting the same meal.
Fuck, you have no idea how angry shit like this makes me (anal, I know)…!
Don’t be full of crap Rich…! Not everyone is a presenter, and not all ‘slides’ need to accompany a speaker! C’mon!
Think http://www.postsecret.blogspot.com – powerful ‘slides’ that can be shared without a speaker accompanying them. SlideShare simply offers new ways to share static images.
My slides (the one’s I use in my presentation) have less and less text all the time as I get more confident speaking on my subject. I can share with with SlideShare and allow people the opportunity to interpret on their own.
I still think it’s a killer service – :P
Sure, you could use it for images, but that’s not what it’s for, we both know that. It’s meant for presos (hell, they even say that themselves), and that’s a bad thing. If you wanted to upload an image set might I suggest flickr?
As for allowing people to interpret your slides on their own, is that really what you want? Generally speaking, it shouldn’t be.
I still think it’s a crap service, and more to the point, a dangerous one that spreads the over-populated presentation plague…!
Rich…! Here’s an application: each time I do a preso at a conference I get requests for the slides. Why not use a service like this in that case, host it online, people can access, comment and interact at will instead of 5Mb+ emails going back and forth. What say you?
Mike, to get back to this again, trust me here, please. Never, ever send your slides without yourself (ever).
If you’re thinking like that, your slides are over-populated, and thus damaging your message in its primary purpose. Your slides must not be self-explanatory.
I’m a geek, I love tech, I love new ideas and new things, I’ll try anything once, I can even be humble sometimes, but not this time. You are wrong, and so is slideshare. Ignore me to the detriment of your audiences.
Oh, and I’m not alone in my thinking:
http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2006/12/slideshare_and_.html
As much as I’ve enjoyed watching the battle royale above..
@Rich – SlideShare is not a personal attack on your values ;)
Haha, seriously though – it’s a rad platform for sharing ideas in powerpoint format, not necessarily presentations in the way we understand them.
You’re perfectly correct in that the speaker IS the presentation, and not the other way around – the powerpoint should be a visual aid only, not the entire speech. Submitting one of your presentations should effectively be pointless, but using it as a tool and sharing service for communicating ideas in an assembled document is worthwhile.
@Mike – would it not be a good idea to include a narrative at the bottom of your slides? (Not sure if you do already), or doing a VideoCast on uStream or similiar? This way you can give a full presentation, slides included in video format and use SlideShare in an auxiliary download service.
Enjoying your blog, keep it rocking :)