Archive for October 13th, 2006

SlideShare – Sharing Your PowerPoint and OpenOffice Presentations a la YouTube

Posted on Oct 13, 2006 | Categories: Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Snippets, Knowledge Tools, Personal KM, Productivity Tools, Social Computing | 5 Comments

A couple of days ago, Dennis McDonald actually sent me an invitation to try out a new offering that has just gone live a little while ago that is supposed to be what YouTube is to videos but this one would be to presentation slides. Check out Slideshare and prepare to have some serious fun ! I must admit that I have never been too keen on working with PowerPoint slides, nor OpenOffice’s, while giving presentations out to people. I have always preferred to have a much better pitch than a bunch of slides since I have always found them a bit distracting from the overall message. Never mind the issues of getting the slides to look like you would want for all audiences regardless of what type of computer people would use.

Well, that may well be about to change because when Dennis sent out to me that invite to try it out, and also he created a weblog post on Slide Presentation: "Expertise Management Systems", where he is actually demoing how it works, I think I am sold on it. Yes, Slideshare is to presentation sharing what YouTube is to video sharing. Fun, fun, fun ! Way too much fun ! I may actually start liking some of this, too !

Take a look into his presentation slides around the subject of Expertise Management Systems. A very complex topic that he manages to make it a breeze by putting together some really good slides and then make them available through Slideshare. Nifty ! Dennis just gets to discuss enough on those slides to make people want some more on this very same topic and perhaps he has got that intention. So I am not going to comment on the content of the slides just yet. I shall be doing so as he gets to explore more of their content in his weblog. However, watch the nice look and feel of the slides, and how easy it is to navigate back and forth. Doesn’t it make you feel like you would want to have some more?

Notice as well how you can get an instant count of presentation hits so that you know how many folks have actually seen them. How you can actually use Tagging to be able to annotate the presentation so that you can find it much easier at a later time and how you can also see the speaker notes you may have been adding all along. Sharing the slides is also something very easy to do, but if there is anything that I really like about Slideshare is the fact that you can embed those same slides into any kind of web site, like I am about to do myself below. How cool is that? So instead of telling people to come and visit the site and check the slides you can do so already from wherever you are !

Yes, indeed, Slideshare may well change the way I get to handle presentations and I am sure I would be using it in the near future much more (Stay tuned for that one! I just got the perfect presentation to show it in full action!), but for the time being check out the slides Dennis put together on the subject of Expertise Management Systems and keep having fun ! (Goodness, I never thought I would be saying something like that for any kind of presentation ! heh)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,