Make your presentations stickier: these 3 books can help
Steve Jobs and the art of the swordsman

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?"

The comments to this entry are closed.