Now you can sync narration with your slides on Slideshare

A couple of weeks ago Slideshare announced Slidecast, a new feature which lets you sync audio with slides you upload to Slideshare. This is a good step in the right direction. Slides alone are not something I get too excited about, but narration with visual support is something much better. There is some potential here. There are no transition effects available, but I do not see that as a huge problem since the effects are abused much of the time anyway. If you wanted to make a slide show set to music you would want to use something like iPhoto exported to QuickTime to get the emotion of fades, etc. (This is what I used last summer to create our Hawaii wedding slideshow). But for teaching something or reporting something, etc. in a straight forward manner, the simplicity of Slidecast's output works well. I think I'll be using it in future. Below you can see a sample bit I did very quickly to see if it works. It was buggy for me (beta) but I got it to work.

My sample



Below is a presentation by Slideshare's Jonathan Boutelle on how to create a Slidecast.



Guy Kawasaki and Slideshare
Speaking of Slideshare, they announced recently that Guy Kawasaki is serving as one of the Board Advisors. Slideshare is talking to investors now and looking to kick it up a notch. And speaking of Guy Kawasaki, I wanted to let you know that Guy has agreed to write the Foreword for Presentation Zen (the book). He's the perfect person since he has probably seen more bad presentations then just about anyone.

Also as you may have heard, Guy launched a new website called Truemors in June  (Truemors for Facebook). The launch of this site has been controversial (to say the least). Below you can see the slides that Guy used in a presentation to talk about this web venture. As always, Guy keeps his sense of humor.

Comments

[Milton Y.]

Garr, did you ever thought of using screenwriting techniques for presentations?
I mean, I read Syd Field's Screenplay book, and it provides clever insights about how to carry a person's perceptions throughout a given time.
Take a look and tell us what you think!

Some of his articles:
http://www.sydfield.com/featured.htm

[Garr]

>Some of his articles:
http://www.sydfield.com/featured.htm

Thanks for the link! The pitching article is really good. Yes, always the question is "what's the story here?" "What's all this mean?"

[Bruce]

Great Potential for sharing presentations. It seems that todays release of the new Keynote may have some of the same features built in.

[Mark James Normand]

I think this is a good tool and wish to use this to incorporate into my own site. I have used slideshare a few times for my own site and to upload and share with others. Look for "How To: Visual Effects in PowerPoint" (should update to 2007 version i guess for the folks).

Q) One quick question regarding the 'cast' portion: Are there any good FREE hosts for uploading podcasts to. It would be great if Slideshare could actually incorporate this into the application for slide casting.

I guess once they figure out how to keep the animation in - then they could really take on a lot of other commerical products used for this type of conferencing.

great product.

[Lei Jin]

Hello, Mark: if you are looking for a host for podcast to sync with your slide, I invite you to check out www.myplick.com We offer all the functionalities as slideshare including the ability to do slidecast, and we also allow you to upload audio onto our site. Plus, you get the ability to get very detailed analytical data about your presentation, viewer demographics, which slides were read in each visit, and how long people spent watching each slides, etc.

[Canarus]

Because Slideshare usialy has a technical problems I Shange it to www.myplick.com

Actually more faster and esy to use !