Friday, July 25, 2008

Blogging and podcasting: personal syndication for fun and profit

Summary: Presentation with links and references, which can help you find, use, and produce blogs and podcasts.

I recently gave a presentation at work which my teammates seemed to like. The presentation discusses blogging and podcasting and addresses such questions as:
  • Why would you want to read blogs and listen to podcasts?
  • Where can you find interesting blogs and podcasts?
  • How do you start a blog?
  • How dow you produce a podcast?
  • Where do you store the podcast files?
  • How do you stream audio and video podcasts?
  • And many more.
Coincidentally, at about the same time, a couple of (non-technical) friends asked me about the very same topics, so I thought I would make this presentation available online to help both technical and non-technical -- okay, make it semi-technical -- people, who are just starting on the path to blogging and podcasting.

Here is the inline version of the presentation (the best part of the presentation is links to resources and articles, so don't miss them):


If you want to access the presentation directly, use the following links:By the way, I was not sure which presentation sharing/hosting service to use, so I started investigating by reading two excellent reviews at Digital Inspiration:First, I tried the services not mentioned in the reviews: ThinkFree's Online Office and Microsoft's Office Live Workspace. I did not like either of them. ThinkFree removed all hyperlinks from the presentation and did not offer any way to put them back, while Office Live's sharing screen looked rather ugly (dunno, maybe I did not use it correctly). Anyway, I tried Scribd recommended by Digital Inspiration, and I really liked it. I suspect that there may be better options (such as SlideShare), but Scribd fulfilled my immediate needs; I may try other services in future, though.

UPDATE #1: Apparently, Scribd turned off hyperlinking capability from the online presentations, which is a shame. I'm now back to square one: looking for a better online presentation hosting service.

UPDATE #2: I just found out that Docstoc offers pretty much the same features as Scribd, but it also supports embedded hyperlinks. Kudos to Docstoc. I updated the embedded presentation (and reference to it) to point to the Docstoc version.

Posted by Alek Davis at 1:09 PM

Labels: , ,

7 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 25, 2008 at 9:59 PM

    Alex - you may also want to give issuu.com a try - it's for PDFs but you get a flip reader with that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alek DavisJuly 26, 2008 at 4:06 PM

    Thanks for the reference, Amit. I'll check it out.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJuly 29, 2008 at 9:43 PM

    Alex, glad that you shared the presentation :) You can always use Zoho office for sharing presentations.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alek DavisJuly 29, 2008 at 9:57 PM

    Thanks Mayank. I'll try Zoho on another presentation. Frankly, I'm satisfied with Scribd, although there are some minor problems: full frame does not work from Blogger, no comments, no custom animation (don't really need custom animation for this preso, but still, would be nice to have).

    ReplyDelete
  5. AKJuly 30, 2008 at 7:25 AM

    Hi Alek,

    Thanks for mentioning OTT as a recommended blog to check out in your presentation! That really means a lot! It's a great honor.

    Great presentation also, I just went through it. Really good info.

    Thanks again!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alek DavisJuly 30, 2008 at 8:51 AM

    Thanks Aseem. I like your blog; learned a lot from it. keep it up.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Alek DavisAugust 13, 2008 at 5:46 PM

    Okay, I tried Zoho and SlideShare on another presentation and did not like either of them. Zoho seriously screwed up the slide formatting (fonts, white space, etc). And SlideShare did not support hyperlinks (I kinda saw them displayed as hyperlinks -- mu mouse cursor changed to a finger -- but clicking the link did not seem to do anything), so I'm sticking with Scribd for now.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)