SlideShare makes PowerPoint a little more Web 2.0-friendly

If you’re a regular (and dedicated) reader of The E-Learning Curve Blog, you’ll recall that in did a compare / contrast between authorSTREAM and SlideShare some months back. At the time I concluded:

So which service is better? Well, I guess that comes down to WIIFM - what's in it for me. The broad sweep of features and functionality are pretty similar on both services: deficiencies in one are accommodated by lack of functionality in the other, so it really comes down to personal choice.

My user experience of authorSTREAM was slightly superior to that of SlideShare: upload and conversion times were lower on the former service, for example. Equally, the enhanced slide animation and transition support on authorSTREAM was a positive advantage, as was the ability to view presentations in full-screen mode via a third party environment (my blog in this case). I also prefer the extended functionality afforded by the desktop-based client client, as well as the better audio integration.

In the end... well, I recommend that you try both out yourself, and you decide which service meets your needs.

Since then, both services have been nice enough to keep me up-to-date with developments in their respective apps. As you can imagine, most of these updates are incremental changes in functionality, better app stability, and so on, but the latest update from SlideShare really excited me.

As an inveterate user of PowerPoint Add-ins (Camtasia, Presenter, PowerManual etc) I find the facility to generate e-learning content from within an authoring application to be an essential component of the Rapid E-Learning production process. As it happens, I’m presenting at an event tomorrow where my e-learning “wow factor” will be How to Create E-Learning Content in Four Mouse Clicks; and a PowerPoint add-in is an important part of that narrative.

You can now generate e-elearning objects in PowerPoint and publish them to the SlideShare website, using the new SS ribbon add-in. This looks like being a very cool tool indeed, and if I get all my shopping done, I’ll install and test over the next few days.

Meet the SlideShare Ribbon in PowerPoint 2007

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