Week 6 - SlideShare Web2.0 experiment

SlideShare

The week 6 web2.0 activity for exploring SlideShare begins at www.SlideShare.net and I have now created an account and logged-in.

It appears that SlideShare is a social networking website that allows users to share their presentations (colloquially known as slide shows, hence the name slide-share) on any subject.

The tool allows users to upload presentations using various software such as MS PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote (Mac), or Adobe. The presentations are created on the user’s software, and then uploaded to the SlideShare website for sharing.

Users can further tag their presentations with keywords making them easier to find by others or even “Ping” others (a short public message sent to a user’s “SlideSpace”) to allow them to know you are sharing a new presentation.

The “SlideSpace” is similar to a user’s homepage with contacts and email information for Pinging others with. The user can also elect to send private messages using their ‘message user’ feature on the SlideSpace which sends a single email to the specific user.

Users can also embed their presentations into blogs or websites, browse others’ presentations, and comment on them as well—even on individual slides! One aspect that helps user connect is the tool indexes presentations by transcripts and allows search engines to find these indexes. Another useful social tool is the “Zing” which allows users or guests to “vote” or rate your presentations to show its popularity!

And it’s FREE! They have plans for future paid accounts with more features, but state that will not affect the free accounts (seems like we’ve heard this before, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how popular this becomes…)

The process for uploading/adding a slideshow or presentation seems to be pretty straightforward, although the instructions were a bit hard to find. As a “newbie” I expected some help right on the front page that told me what this tool was and how to use it, but NO, I had to go looking for that. Anyway, I don’t want to be a whiner, so here are the simple two-step instructions for uploading:

Step 1: The first step is the actual uploading of the PowerPoint/OpenOffice/Keynote/PDF file to our servers. During this upload process, the blue progress bar will keep you informed that the uploading process is going on.

Step 2: The second step is converting the uploaded file to SlideShare's format for sharing it online. Once the file is uploaded successfully, it is placed in the queue for conversion. The SlideShare people would like you to note that “…if there are a lot of slideshows in the queue, then this might take a while. You can move away from the page and come back to check later. Look in the "My SlideSpace" page for the converted file. If there was an error in the conversion stage, these files will not show up in the front of your "My SlideSpace". You will need to go to the "My SlideSpace/Edit All" to find the files that were not successfully converted.”

Personal note: This uploading process does take a few MINUTES, be patient.

Here’s a link to the SlideShare blog on new features:

http://blog.SlideShare.net/2007/01/24/rolling-out-new-features-in-SlideShare/

To embed the SlideShare presentation into your blog or website, the process seems to be equally simple

From the SlideShare.net website:

• First view the slideshow on SlideShare.
• On the right of the slideshow player you, you'll see a text box called Embed into your blog, with funny looking code in it.


• It should look something like this--object type"="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="blah blah blah" width="425" height="348"--param name="movie" value="blah blah blah">:/object">!!>
  
• If you take that code and paste it into a blog posting or web site, then you would get a little embedded slideshow there.

And now, without further adieu, here is my first SlideShare:

These slides are taken from (courtesy of) the Forbes magazine article “Seven Amazing Robots that will Change your Life” They are ONLY for educational purposes to test the SlideShare Web2.0 tool’s ease of use and effectiveness.