Slideshows and social networking

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

I don't care what Edward Tufte says about PowerPoint, the source of the problem lies not with the tool but with the tool user.

PowerPoint presentations can be extremely effective, for example, consider Lawrence Lessig’s style, and no matter how much criticism people might heap upon them there’s little chance that corporate America is going to jettison PowerPoint presentations in the near future.

My focus this week is on a distribution platform for slideshows called SlideShare, which combines slideshow distribution with (guess what) social networking.

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I don't care what Edward Tufte says about PowerPoint, the source of the problem lies not with the tool but with the tool user.

PowerPoint presentations can be extremely effective, for example, consider Lawrence Lessig’s style, and no matter how much criticism people might heap upon them there’s little chance that corporate America is going to jettison PowerPoint presentations in the near future.

My focus this week is on a distribution platform for slideshows called SlideShare, which combines slideshow distribution with (guess what) social networking.

You can upload presentations in PowerPoint (ppt and pps), OpenOffice (odp), and PDF format as long as they don’t exceed 30MB. SlideShare’s servers convert your uploaded presentations into Flash movies complete with controls to navigate the content.

SlideShare converted presentations are a little limited as transitions and animations aren’t supported. This is a big issue and hopefully one that the company will fix in the near future. Embedded sound is also not supported but you can synchronize audio files hosted elsewhere on the Internet – a feature that SlideShare calls “slidecasting.”

The service is still under development and in the SlideShare FAQ the company confesses that when slideshow conversions fail with the hugely useless error message of “OOPs” you will have to hunt around for the cause – their service doesn’t explain what went wrong. According to the FAQ, “it's possible our converter is temporarily down, try uploading once again / if your file is password protected or contains macros, you might get an OOPs; remove them and upload again / this might occur if your presentation file has a reference to an external image or file (i.e. instead of embedding the image inside the presentation, it is kept on your computer and referenced externally from within the file); you can solve this by embedding the image in your file and uploading again.”

On the plus side, “The entire content of your slideshow - slide transcripts, slide title, description, tags etc will be indexed by search engines and show up in search results.”

The original presentation is also kept on SlideShare, which allows you to download it as needed (for example, when you’re at a prospect’s office or speaking at a conference and your laptop has just died and your backup CD is scratched).

Once SlideShare has converted your presentation you can make it private or public. If it is set to private you can create a secret URL to give to anyone you like so they can view it, and that secret URL can be disabled when needed.

Public presentations are just that, public and available to all users. SlideShare generates a code fragment for each presentation so that you can embed it in your own blog or Web site.

The social networking attributes of SlideShare include tagging, your own SlideShare page (similar to a MySpace page) where comments (called “pings”) from other users can be displayed. Slideshows can be rated (these are called “zings”) and you can bookmark favorite slideshows and slides, send private messages via SlideShare to other users, and see the list of presentations owned by your contacts. SlideShare also shows which presentations are the most popular, most downloaded, most viewed, and the most recently added as well as featured slideshows.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.