Slideshare

Yes, I've signed up for something else! This time it's Slideshare, because there are many people on Second Life (yes, yes, I know you're tired of hearing about that) who use this. As you may recall, I have been using Zoho to create slideshows (PowerPoint type presentations) and embed them into this blog (and perhaps elsewhere).
Such as this latest one from Zoho:


In Slideshare, you have to create your slides elsewhere. Fortunately, I have PowerPoint available on this computer because the Zoho slideshow file format is not supported. Oh, dear! I'll have to start over. Perhaps with something easy:

| View | Upload your own

Okay, that wasn't so bad, other than having to deal with PowerPoint, which was not as easy as Zoho nor as much fun and creative as Scrapblog. I was hoping it would be as familiar as Publisher, but I found it confusing. I should probably complain about PowerPoint in some other blog, but it was the main thing that slowed me down. I had to download each picture from Flickr to this computer. Zoho will take the url directly and has an actual link to Flickr (but I have almost 4,000 pictures up and they don't currently have a way to get at the sets, like Scrapblog does). Not even Slideshare's uploading and conversion (rather like YouTube in that respect) was that lengthy. Odd that. Slideshare can be uploaded directly to Blogger (as well as MySpace, Facebook, and LiveJournal, to name a few) on the sidebar, but we all know my sidebar here is full.
Good gracious! The slideshow has been looked at twice and I just got it up! I wonder if they're counting my previews while I'm blogging this ... Gottinhimmeldonnerwetter!* The count is up to 7!!! Just while I've been typing this bit! Well, that's why I put it up there: to be seen! This is so exciting! Hee. Ah, and the counter differentiates between views and views of embedded slideshow. Nice.
This could be useful (and fun) if you have any slideshows you want to share with the world at large. Also, you're supposed to be able to add sound to the slideshow. Don't have sound on this computer, so I'll give that test a miss for the moment.

* a little German swearing by the weather

At Last ...

It's more than a month in the making ... but here is the Science in Second Life slideshow:
(Cross your fingers)

zoho comes through!

Here is the slideshow I tried to embed before, but now I have no trouble with at all!

Testing Zoho, 1-2-3!

An article in this month's School Library Journal reviewed some on-line slideshow programs. The first one was at google.docs ... and because I have a Google account (which is what Blogger is), I went there first. :( /me no like. Very basic, not much fun. So I next tried Zoho, which I thought was brilliant ... until I came to the part where I could embed the slideshow in my blog ... and it doesn't work in this blog. And we all know I've been embedding in this blog until the cows wended their way homeward. So, if you want to see what I created, you'll have to click on the link:

http://show.zoho.com/public/marfita/Virtual%20Afterlife

Other than the embedding problem, I found it loads of fun to use. Sure, it could use more flashy stuff like Scrapblog, but Zoho is more a business site and Scrapblog is a fun site. There is lots more office software available on Zoho and I think it would be a very useful tool for our patrons who would like to share the work they do or who need an on-line alternative to the Microsquash Office.
Now, if they can only work out that embedding thingie.

Photobucket (some people pronounce it "boo-kay")

It's been a long time since I've used my Photobucket account. I had made a slideshow a while back, but couldn't find it when I visited today. There are more types of "themes" than I remember. I think I just needed something to embed somewhere and didn't look farther than that. I looked at the Neverland theme, because it seemed appropriate to my old Second Life photos, but it was just an icky border with Peter Pan and Tinkerbell staring back at you. I looked at some others but in the end I think I used the same one I had last time.

I like this one because it shows the titles I carefully (I thought "carefully" - I just saw one of them and wondered what I really meant) added to each of these photos because it doesn't take those added previously. Flickr uses whatever label you put on them, either stamped from your camera, or added afterwards, as a default, which you can change later. In Photobucket you get a thumbnail and that's it. But the embeddable slideshow is pretty cool. I haven't added music because I can't really listen to it where I am right now (and I find music can be annoying when it shows up everywhere). These Photobucket slideshows are limited in size, unlike the Flickr ones that can be ginormous, but they are just for viewing the photos, not tarting them up with fancy visuals or sound. There are several other online programs that can do a fancy slideshow, such as Scrapblog and Animoto, which I've blogged about below. Photobucket can load a slideshow directly to MySpace, if you're into that.