I’ve been fond of Slideshare for months, and have been meeting to blog about how they’ve quielty rolled in social networking features, but their newly announced feature today of providing the ability to upload and synchronize sound to slides is the proclaimed Killer App Kick All the Others in the Butt.
What they have done in offering the ability to create Slidecasts is to create essentially what was so great back in 2003 with what was then known as Macromedia Breeze, which was then known as big bucks software to use.
Now you can do exactly what one could do in Breeze… on the web… for free!
So since I had just posted last night about my goal to provide a workshop on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story — adding the audio to my posted presentation was a snap. The MP3 needs to be sitting at a URL (Slideshare suggests OurMedia but having my own server meant just a simple FTP upload). Connecting a Slideshare presentation with an audio file allows you to use a simple wave form timeline to synchronize a slide show to a sound track.
The simplicity was lovely.
In fact, this is way easier than it was in Breeze.
So now my story carries audio where ever it goes – the embed I used on yesterday’s post did not even need to be changed.
I am really, really, really, really excited about this capability. No longer do you have to try in vain to sift meaning from a presenter-less presentation file, if they have taken the effort to record audio and synch it up.
Slidecasts are going to rock! Get out there and cast!
Comment Linktribution to Becky for letting me know of this.
Also, I had noticed that my Slideshare profile was old and did not have a sharable creative commons license applied to my uploaded stuff, so I had to update each one. I am noticing that CC licenses are sadly lacking in most of the 50 tools I have been looking at.
I hope to have a draft of the workshop ready for viewing by end of the week (if I dont keep getting distracted by cool stuff)
You’re on a roll dog, thanks for this an all the other gems you have posted as of late that I have been too busy playing with to comment 🙂
Does it seem to anyone else as though Wired Campus reading the blogosphere a little more lately – as a source of news articles?
This story appeared on Wired Campus today – 8/6/2007 – about Slidecasts.
http://tinyurl.com/ytrz8j
-Chris
Hee Hee, and someone already picked up on that, Thanks Loyal followers.
I tried slidecast, but it didn’t work for me. Upload the slides and audio take forever, and once uploaded, I couldn’t get the audio to play. Time to hunt for another tool.
JohnT- Too bad, but usual disclaimers apply: YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), but my experience is not the same. Best of luck hunting.