Slidesharin'

For the past week or so I've been playing with Slideshare, the new YouTube-for-PowerPoint created by Uzanto.

The best part about giving a talk (for me) is interacting with the audience, taking questions and having a conversation with people after its done. In most cases, the conversation ends soon after the presentation. I'm pretty good about posting my slides, but they don't have the same value after the talk.

The brilliant thing about Slideshare is how it enables those conversations with people who didn't see the original presentation. You can comment on and link to individual slides, embed slides in web pages, share them with people, and even present them right from Slideshare (there's a full screen mode).

Rashmi explains the value well:

The process of sharing slides is broken. It goes from my hard drive to yours via email. Or if I put it online, its in a clunky format like pdf or Powerpoint that you need to download.

Slideshare solves that problem. It webifies your slides - it makes the experience of viewing them, sharing them with individuals or groups smooth and seamless.

(You can also read the Techcrunch review. I have some Slideshare invites left--email me at atomiq [at] gmail.com if you're interested.)

Finally, here's the presentation on learning from disasters I gave a few weeks ago:

Yes, that's Heinz blue ketchup.