PowerPoint presentations speak with SlideShare
SlideShare, which lets you share PowerPoint presentations with the world, today added the capability to match audio tracks to slide shows. This is a cool feature that podcasters could exploit to show and tell a story at the same time. Professors, marketers, and other storytellers might give this free tool a whirl to provide remote access to their work instead of using software such as Adobe Captivate or TechSmith Camtasia. You could even use Slideshare to narrate a PowerPoint-based photo gallery of your vacation. Come to think of it, why don't more photo-sharing sites follow Zooomr's lead (more here) by letting you add narration to pictures?
SlideShare makes embedding a file from PowerPoint or Keynote into any blog or Web page cut-and-paste painless. The site attracted more than 3 million unique visits last month, with slides in more than 11 languages. Who knew cruising through PowerPoint files could be fun? You can find slide shows on nearly any subject; popular topic tags include "Web 2.0" and "humor." The site's social networking lets you interact alone or in groups, tagging and commenting on each others' presentations. SlideShare will add privacy options later.
To use the new feature, just upload a PowerPoint to Slideshare, then upload an MP3 file to the Internet Archive or elsewhere. Next, Slideshare's Create Slidecast feature will sync the sound with the slides. You can match chunks of a speech or song to precise slides, or create a freeflowing soundtrack instead.
If you're trying to mimic some experimental Andy Warhol film, you could create a dizzying effect by embedding a bunch of slideshows onto one Web page and then playing them all at once. More practical, however, are SlideShare's Facebook app and its API for developers. Check out this open-source slidecasting sample below (more examples here). If the audio doesn't play, you might be an early bird, so try again a bit later this morning:
http://www.bubbleshare.com/