#cpd23 Thing 17: Slideshare and prezi

Slideshare is useful but not perfect.  A few things I've learnt the hard way that might be of use:

• Make the text on your title slide good and big.  That way people will be able to read it more clearly on when it's shown as a thumbnail on your homepage and elsewhere.
• Slideshare proclaims to upload your speaker notes with your slides.  In my experience, this only works for .pptx files (i.e. 2007 and later versions of Powerpoint), and only the first time you upload.  If you make changes and upload your presentation again, the notes won't be updated, and if you've added extra slides your notes will end up out of alignment.
• Slideshare doesn't reproduced animation effects in your presentations, so if you have one slide on which various things appear one-by-one, they'll be there together in one go on Slideshare.  I get round this by making individual slides for each new appearing thing.
• EDITED 23/11/11. Lastly, Slideshare only has a fairly limited repertoire of fonts that it supports automatically.  Embedding your fonts in a presentation seems to get round this OK if you save your file as a .pptx file (that's the newer version of Powerpoint, from 2007 onwards). Normally I'd recommend that you save your files as .ppt, as the newer .pptx format cannot be read by people who have the older software (or who are running open source software), but for the purposes of Slideshare it seems that .pptx is the way to go (see also speaker notes, above). If you don't have access to newer Powerpoint, your best bet is to check in advance whether your fonts will work: here are some slides that show a few fonts that do and don't work out of the box, or try uploading a test slide when you're planning your slides.
• EDITED 23/11/11 I forget to say in the original post that you should never put important, or clickable (yes - add clickable links in your Slideshare slides, that's where they're useful, not in the slides you show in person) links near the edge of your slides.  You never know what will be cut off if the projection is bad, and clicking at the edge of slides on Slideshare makes them advance or go backwards.  So links near the edges are no use.

So, to be honest, I think Slideshare could be better. But it is better than nothing, I suppose.  If I'm giving a talk that I think will be of interest to people who didn't hear it in person, I make two versions of the file: one for use on the day (less text, fewer slides in total) and one to upload to Slideshare (added text, more slides in total).  Trying to make one version that suits both purposes is beyond my skill!

As for Prezi, well, I made a quick Prezi about that:

Some thoughts on Prezi on Prezi

Thing 11: "I am aweary of this moon"

Oh dear, oh dear, I've really been procrastinating over getting round to doing Thing 11, and all because I really don't feel like watching a bunch of random slideshows.  If I could remember any interesting presentations I've seen at conferences I'd have a search for them, but nothing much springs to mind right now.  But here I am, knuckling down, and leaning heavily on the Cam23-supplied prompts:

What are your thoughts about the tool?
I somehow don't like how it looks, and I'm not sure why.  The advanced search could be easier to find, and I'd like to be able to search for users via their user names but also by searching their user information.  Something has made the BBC live radio player hang a couple of times, and I suspect it might be Slideshare, so it's not very popular with me right now.  But it certainly fills a niche, and I can't see any glaring problems with the way it delivers slides.

It's worth noting that writing a slideshow for independent use is different to writing it to be talked to in real time, so some of the show work better than others.

What particular benefits to your Library are there from using Slideshare?
I think having induction/information presentations online for readers to use could be useful - it's one more way of reaching people, and it's often easier to explain how to use a service in bit-sized picture heavy formats than in a wall of text.  Screen recording tools (like those discussed by Phil Bradley here)  also seem useful for this.

Did you find any interesting presentations that you would like to share?
This isn't the prettiest presentation ever (and a couple of words drop off the bottom of the screen), but it's a good basic introduction and works well without the original speaker .

Using the Social Web to Promote and Provide Access to Special Collections

View more presentations from Colleen Greene.

Did you find any other users from a Cambridge University or College library?
No, but I didn't look very hard (Bad Girl! No biscuit!).

Will you use Slideshare in the future?
Yes, I'll certainly use Slideshare or something similar in the future to make available presentations that I give in the Library, at conferences, for public events etc.