Voice of experience on Open Social

Dave Winer is the voice of experience on Open Social. There is something evil about Google leading the charge against Facebook. It reminds me of MicroSoft coming out with PowerPoint or Internet Explorer. In my opinion, Google can take a big hit on this one. Don't get me wrong, I like standards. Because of my experience, I'm more and more doubtful of Google as they dominate more and more.

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Screencasts meets Zlides and RSS

I'm working on yet another presentation. I'm having trouble getting it written because I really don't have the right tools.

Screencasts are the greatest way take an presentation and make it available on the web. Just making your PowerPoint available does not cut it. Sometimes people read their PowerPoint stack as their presentation, but then you have a terrible presentation.

Also, most of my presentations talk about the web and web sites. I'm sick and tired of screen capturing into PowerPoint. Besides, think about the workflow. Go to web site, screen capture, paste into PowerPoint, convert PowerPoint to web, post on web. This is not very efficient and makes for a terrible presentation if you have to cut away from your PowerPoint to you browser.

So I was thinking more about Zlides.com and how to make a better presentation. The basic premise of Zlides is that the presentation is a RSS feeds. That is the elegant design.

But Zlides as it currently exists depends on creating the content within Zlides. I think I have a way to incorporate an demo within Zlides. So for example, the presentation would go: Zlide one, Zlide two, http://www.abcedmindedness.com, Zlide four. In other words, the third zlide would not be content from zlides.com but rather a redirect to a website's page. The problem is that the zlide's player was meant to be a single page web application and I would need a new approach.

What got me thinking about all of this was the tabs in Firefox. Why not load up the presentation in Firefox where each "slide" was a different tab. Since the presentation is an RSS feed, you could "subscribe" to the presentation as a "Live Bookmark". Then you can "Open All Tabs" to load all of the "slides" including the demo web pages into your browser. Hit F11 and then tab through your presentation live.

Now take your presentation and use your favorite screencasting software. With very little effort you now have a screencast of your presentation which is much more effective than putting the PowerPoints online.

Now to make this work.