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« knowing knowledge | Main | six word plan »

October 26, 2006

Comments

Amit Ranjan

Dave,

My name is Amit and I am from the Slideshare team.

I am sorry that SlideShare does not match up to your expectations. Unfortunately thats the way this technology is at this point in time. Hopefully some time soon, we'll should be able to handle this much better.

Specifically, I did a quick investigation of the presentation that you uploaded. SlideShare does not support slide animations at present and thats why your slide 6 & 7 dont have the animation in the swfs. It shows the snapshot of the slides when the animation has ended.

Secondly, on slide 6 of the uploaded slideshow, I noticed two rectangular coloured boxes that don't seem to appear in the original presentation. On inspecting the actual presentation, we found that it does contain two transparent objects, and thats whats been shown though in the slides, though its coloured and not transparent.

We'll use your feedback to improve our product. Hopefully (in the not too distant future), we'll try to give you a delightful experience with our product.

regards

Amit

Alan

I'm not sure what your scale of "web 2.0-ness" you seek. I never really looked at slideshare as a means to do everything in PowerPoint in a web format.

So what it adds (IMHO) is:
* Much easier format to share a basic presentation, not a bloated giant file that requires a download and client.
* ability to tag presentations, comment on a presentation using the YouTube like interface
* A subtle feature is there is a way you can have a URl that loads a slidesare show at a specific slide, so perhaps it can create micro-content

Another thing you have to like is how developers, like Amit, are staying in tune with people's usage, it is the first public version of the product that will evolve (flickr was not all it is now in 2004). I want hyperlinks to work! Evem if it is in the extracted portion.

Lastly, the "evilness" of Powerpoint is not the tool (like blaming a hammer for the crooked shelves I build)... it does not "force" you into anything. I have seen beautiful, elegant PPTs presentatiosn that are not death by bullet 60 slide text firehoses.

Once more, it is the craft, not the tools, that make a difference.

I'm not shilling slideshare, and likely would not use it all that often (since I almost never use PPT), but see it as promise as a better way to share PPT content.

dave lee

hi amit and alan:
thank you both for your comments. as i said in my post, i'm in total agreement with you alan that the problem is with the carpenter and not the hammer. but i know that if you tell a carpenter he has to drive nails to get paid but never give him a hammer, he'll use whatever tool is available - a brick, the heal of his boot, whatever. the job won't be done right but it'll be done.

i agree that powerpoint can be an incredibly compelling tool. amit says the problem with my presentations in slideshare is that i didn't strip out the animations and motion paths (and hidden boxes - i had no clue they were there!) and thus my presentations in slideshare look terrible. that certainly sounds like "give me that hammer, and use this boot instead."

amit i did address the issue of the web just not being capable of handling slide animations and motion paths in my review of slideshare on eelearning wiki. and i agree with alan that the interface that you folks have build is among the best i've seen. it's just too bad it's used to dummy down powerpoint presentations.

but i'm most concerned about statements like michael arrington's in techcrunch that slideshare will be perfect for salespeople to share presentations with clients and each other. without the ability to keep a presentation private on slideshare, a salesperson would be fired before their presentation finished uploading.

so yes, amit, i would agree that your product is an excellent attempt at solving a problem that can't be solved give current technology. that doesn't make it good, it makes it premature.

ps - you might want your engineers to look at some of the presentation capture appliances out on the market - sonic foundry's media site, anystream's apresso coursecaster, winnov's cbox3, or accordant's capture station. these folks are solving your problem today.

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