Friday, June 8, 2007

Preparing to give a series of lectures in Spain

In preparation for my upcoming lecture series in Spain, http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm, I have been working hard on the side lately trying to figure out how aggregation works throughout the blogosphere (see my wiki collaborations at http://beevance.wikispaces.com and http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com). Time is at a premium but I took a moment the other day to accept an invitation from Robin Good, who offered to show me how to aggregate content through http://www.mysyndicaat.com. Robin had made a zany keynote for us at http://wiaoc.org in which he introduced us to http://www.operator11.com and ended by packing up his video streaming equipment and riding off with it on his motorcycle through the streets of Rome.

Robin made clear at the outset that I could make any kind of use of his presentation that I wished, so I made a Camtasia recording. Unfortunately, in the time we had to get set up and under way I was unable to do sound checks or troubleshoot and whereas my own audio was clear in the recording, Robin's came out on my recording garbled and barely comprehensible (problem on my side apparently, not his).

So I made Snaggit screen shots of the presentation and produced a 60-slide ppt show with annotations. This process helped me to consolidate what I had learned and was also done with intent to share. I then tried to upload my slides to http://www.slideshare.net but for some reason it wasn't working, so I used http://www.zoho.com instead. I was not perfectly pleased with the output. There were truncations in some of the slides; e.g. corruption of footer in all of them. But I'm at the end of time available on this effort and so without further ado, here's Robin (wait, further adooooo0000, I managed to upload to Slideshare and have replaced the file here and what I like better about Slideshare is that the links WORK - happy clicking):

4 comments:

Smaran said...

Hey Vance,

I work for SlideShare and I came across your post via Technorati. I was just wondering what problems you experienced uploading presentations to SlideShare and if there's anything I could do to help.

Vance Stevens said...

How cool that you came upon my note in this posting. Slide share has been working well for me but when I tried to do this upload (7 megabytes? shouldn't be a problem) first I found the server down. Then I went home and tried to upload but I got a yellow triangle exclamation mark with a note that the server was being contacted. And then nothing. For a long time. Finally I got two buttons and I think one said publish. It was on the right. When I clicked it, it went away but nothing happened. I tried again in the morning. Same thing. I'll try again now and try and let you know if I encounter the same error (via your profile here perhaps)? Thanks very much for getting in touch, much appreciated. I like Slideshare because the links are rendered clickable, as is not the case with Zoho. Vance

Vance Stevens said...

I just tried again and I am getting this message: SlideShare is undergoing maintenance and will be available soon.

500 : Service unavailable.

Please try again after some time.

13:00 GMT June 9, 2007 from Abu Dhabi

Arvind said...

Vance : Thanks for trying out Zoho Show and sorry about the links in your slides not being clickable & the footers getting truncated/corrupted.

Believe you left the "Read Only" option checked (yes, we recommend this option for slides with quite a bit of formatting). This makes each slide as an image and hence the URLs in these slides aren't clickable. Can you try importing the presentation again with the 'Read Only' option unchecked?

We are continuously improving Zoho Show and will soon try addressing this issue.

Arvind
http://zoho.com