Tales from the Techside

Today it seems that the focus is on using video to impress current clients and entice perspective clients to your site. Video is without a doubt one of the best and richest methods of sharing content on your site.

Sometimes though powerpoint is much more suited to the task. Powerpoint provides an easy way for you to share and convey information and many people are familiar and comfortable with using it, more so then with video editing tools. In fact if your like me you have a lot of great powerpoints either on your computer or stored elsewhere that would add some quick high quality content to your site.

How then do you share the powerpoint?

You could set it up so people could download your presentation but then you risk someone taking your work and redistributing it as there own. What we are going to look at are a couple of tools that will allow you to upload your powerpoint presentations and then share them through your site much like you would embed a video.

Thumbstacks

If you want an online solution that works almost exactly like powerpoint then thumbstack is it. The best thing about this system, aside from it is free, is that there is almost no learning curve. Context menus and hot keys such as ctrl-z for undo work perfectly. On the downside you can’t import presentations and you cannot embed the presentation in your site only link to it. Click here to see a sample presentation I made.

Nanolearning

Where I found Thumbstacks was easy to use and intuitive, I found Nanolearning slightly more cumbersome with a just a tad greater learning curve but overall it is a decent solution if you are looking to create online courses. Nanolearning does offer the ability to include interactive activities, movies and audio with your presentation making for a more comprehensive learning experience. As with Thumbstacks you cannot import your presentation but it is fairly simple to build a class and customize it for your needs. Like Thumbstacks you can’t embed your presentation and instead of linking directly to your presentation you link to a landing page for your course so that is not a pro if you want to retain traffic on your site. Click here for my sample nano learning course on sneakernets.

Slideshare

In my opinion this is the hands down the best solution currently available. To use the system all you need to do is import a powerpoint file and it will output a presentation that you can distribute through your website or blog much like youtube or Kyte.tv. You can share slides through slideshare without even logging in they allow for anonymous bulk uploads and as part of the process you can indicate whether or not people can download your file. It took less then a minute for the presentation upload and another to minutes to convert which is great considering it would have taken me much longer to rebuild the presentation from scratch using the other systems.

Another great feature of slideshare is that you can easily add sound to presentation by creating what is called a slidecast. Once your presentation is loaded you can link the presentation to an audio file hosted online by editing the presentation and choosing create slidecast. Slidecasting is a great way to bring your presentation to the next level by not only providing the slides but the the audio presentation as well.

I believe Slideshare has a number of direct uses including:

1. Listing presentation using pictures (basically a free version of Realty Show minus some features)
2. First time home-buyer courses
3. Market summaries
4. Foreclosure protection
5. Local issues briefings
6. Recruitment

What would you use online presentations for and if you have used a system like slideshare how did you use it and did you achieve the results you wanted?

Mark Flavin

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI