Pictures + Voice = Slidecasting

Kudos to the folks at Slideshare who have created a new way to share presentations online.  Your voice can now be added to your presentations.  I haven't had a chance to play with this feature yet—but essentially it looks like you upload an audio file to a previously uploaded presentation and you "splice" the audio to sync up with your slides.

I think this shakes up how thought leadership gets created, produced, shared and distributed.  My one recommendation to the folks at Slideshare?  Figure out how to do simple transitions.  Even fades, which give the illusion of passing time can be helpful in a presentation as you narrate with visuals.

This experience will never replace actually "being there" or even the power of video.  But like blogging and text, it makes it easy for unknown voices to be heard (take it from me).  And if you have a voice—and a good story to go with it, then this tool might just be for you.

Comments

[Cam Beck]

Are you going to retrofit some of your old presentations? That would rock.

[Sean Howard]

Love this!

Can you repost your fuzzy tail one? That would be AWESOME to hear what you had to say about some of those slides...

Be interesting to see how it changes my experience of it... better or worse?

[Michael Seaton]

I think this is an awesome app. However, it is still all about the content.

How long will it be until a boring sales presentation you have been forced to sit through is recast in this model? Garbage in, garbage out.

It's in the way that you use it.

[Cam Beck]

If I put a presentation up, I'll see if James Earl Jones is available to do the narrative, cheap. :)

[DA]

I'll give fuzzy tail a shot. I'm much better live than recorded—but I'll give it a try.

And Micheal—I agree that it's all about content. My blog would have gone nowhere if people thought the content was trash. Same with my presentations on slideshare.

In my mind, someone with a good message, presentation, and voice would do very well with this tool.

[John Dodds]

Is the addition of voice to the online world really an advantage? It's possible to speed-read,scan or flick through slides at an accelerated rate but you can't do that with aural additions. My big problem with podcasts and video is that generally they're too long. If you end up with a page of notes, wouldn't it have been better for you and for the distribution of the "voice" if it had appeared in that form in the first place?

[DA]

John, good point about podcasts as they aren't for everyone—my guess is that the folks who like to listen to audio will appreciate this feature, though it should be noted that you can still "flip through" even with the audio.

I don't think everyone should take advantage of this feature—you have to be pretty good at recording in order for it to work. And I would imagine the shorter ones will probably be more effective.

I agree about notes—slideshare is currently missing that feature which would be a nice addition.

[John Dodds]

How can I flip through audio? I don't know what is there, so I'd be flipping blindly.

[Amit]

John

This is Amit from SlideShare. Came to this conversation from technorati.

About the slidecasting player, you can still use it without audio, like our normal player, advancing slide to slide.

Flipping through the audio is possible, if the buffering of the slides and audio has happened.

David,

Notes with the slides are planned soon, though the slide transition idea you mention will take some time to implement.

amit

[John Dodds]

Thanks Amit - I should clarify that my comments were not Slideshare-specific. My main gripe is with podcasts and audioposts - but my general concern with any audio track is that unless it's tagged with some sort of sectional information (which I accept is more likely with a slide presentation than a podcast per se), then you really can't fast forward without missing stuff.

Thus the time investment must be longer and thus the return has to be also, In my experience, that's rarely the case though again I accept that since presentations are generally crafted and well thought out, this would apply less in the slideshare case.

I had already decided to blog about the audio issue as David's post coincides with another audio blogging intitiative about which have my doubts.

[Jonathan Boutelle]

John,

I think our perspective on the issue is that the slides serve as "tags" (visual shorthand) of the audio.

You can page through to the slide that is about the topic you're interested in, say "this looks like what I came here for", and press play.

Text extraction, tagging of audio stream, etc would all be nice as well: but if the slides have been accurately synched to the audio, then they are an effective browsable index. We hope. ;->

-Jon Boutelle (SlideShare)