After yesterday’s short digression into some of the finer points of heuristic evaluation, today I’m returning to the matter at hand: an assessment of the features and functionality provided by the authorSTREAM and SlideShare hosted presentation distribution services.
Now read on…
authorSTREAM is a web-based PowerPoint presentation sharing platform from authorGEN Technologies. After creating a presentation in Microsoft 
PowerPoint, content creators can upload presentations to the authorSTREAM website. During the upload process the content is converted Adobe to Flash SWF format displayed via the Flash player. Content creators can use the provided HTML code to embed the presentation in a blog or website, as well to share the presentation via e-mail, and submit the content to YouTube. authorSTREAM also enables users to share their presentations via mobile devices that support MV4 playback such as the Apple iPod or iPhone.
Slideshare supports a range of import file types, including PowerPoint PPT, OpenOffice.org Impress, and PDF format. Broadly speaking, we can say that the SlideShare upload process shares many characteristics 
with other Web 2.0 tools, and is in fact very similar to the authorSTREAM submission procedure. Generally speaking, once a file is uploaded and converted to SWF, it is publicly available.
The content creators can choose to make the slide show available to be downloaded. Interestingly for a service provided by a for-profit organization Slideshare is linked with Creative Commons, so various attribution licenses are supported (click here for more thoughts on Open Source Software). As with other hosted Web 2.0 services (including YouTube), a presentation can be viewed in the small screen or take the full screen of a monitor.
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2 responses so far ↓
1
Patricia
// Jul 3, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Good post and comparing. Thank you. I’ve started to use iSpring Pro to convert my powerpoint presentations to flash and found out that SlideBoom appeared. This is a service to share your presentations which I liked a lot. I am sure that this is worth taking a look at.
2
SlideShare makes PowerPoint a little more Web 2.0-friendly | The E-learning Curve at Edublogs
// Dec 17, 2008 at 6:45 pm
[...] 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 [...]
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