The YouTube of PowerPoint

I didn’t realize there could possibly be a wonderful world of PowerPoint until I went to the STC conference this year. Then I was wondering, why we didn’t think of this type of site before? After all, despite Tufte’s protests, PowerPoint type presentations have been the workplace and school norm since caveman figured out how to draw on walls. You could say their series of drawings were the foundation of what we see today in presentations (well, except for the part where people still insist on putting up large pieces of text and reading every slide verbatim).

Slideshare.net does for presentations what YouTube does for videos. People can upload their presentations, watch other people’s presentations, leave comments, add as favorites, follow people, and share the presentations to a multitude of other sites. It will be interesting to see if this mass sharing of presentations helps people learn how to give better presentations based on the abundance of potentially available feedback.

I listened to a presentation on how to be a UX team of one. I thought it was pretty well done. They had the slides and the audio from the presentation recorded as well so it felt like you were there except you weren’t a room full of strangers, squinting at tiny print a thousand feet away, and getting restless sitting in one position for a long time.

Now I realize there are going to be problems at times finding the valuable content. YouTube has the same problem. Freedom to share means freedom to waste people’s time with terrible content. However, I do know people, like Scott Abel, are uploading their presentations. So in the way of other social media sites, it’s up to the users to build their community and know how to search for the hidden gems.