For the last six months, the team I lead has been toiling away on a really ambitious project. Our goal: the integration of web audio with slideshows. I am happy to let readers of this blog know that SlideShare has introduced a new multimedia format that we hope will add a new dimension to how knowledge is shared on the web. Its called ‘SlideCasting’ and this makes previously static web slideshows true, compelling multimedia experiences. This is by far the most challenging web interface (or tool) that my startup has ever attempted to build.

Micheal Arrington covered this on TechCrunch a few days back; here’s Guy Kawasaki’s perspective on this; and here is the coverage from CNet’s Webware.

Slidecasting is essentially a mashup of slides with podcasting. You can connect any mp3 on the web to your slideshow. Once you do that, you can synchronize ‘each’ slide to a particular section of the audio track. We think slidecasting has the potential to unleash a new wave of creativity – you can think of synchronised conference talks, audio stories, podcast interviews, webinars, slidetoons et al. This is the complete howto page about slidecasting.

We kept podcasting in mind while designing slidecasting. Podcasting has gained popularity, but nowhere near what it was once touted to be. And this is mainly because podcasts (unlike videos) are often long, but there is no way of navigating them. We think slidecasting offers a solution to this problem- you can visually navigate through your podcast by moving through different slides. Also we wanted to create a multimedia format that is suited to both creation and consumption on the web. So we are letting users reuse audio that already exists on the web. We are inspired by the idea of ‘small pieces loosely joined’. You can take any mp3 audio link on the web and link it to slides on SlideShare. You can decide how you want the audio to play with the slides. You can synchronize your slides with audio. Or you can choose the ‘I’m feeling lazy’ (no synchronization) or ‘Divide audio equally’ (suited to musical slidecasts) options.

Check out these two examples (click the central play button in the player to start the slidecast)

Lawrence Lessig’s all time classic speech on “Free Culture”!

This slidecast is a parody about everyone’s favorite punching bag- George Bush!

I am looking for some serious feedback about this from the readers of this blog. This is SlideCasting Version 1.0 and we think there is a lot of scope for improvement. So give this a try and help us refine it further. Happy Slidecasting!

Check out these cool visualizations about the internet.

The first is called the Periodic Table of the Internet. This visualization is based on the periodic table that all of us have encountered in high school chemistry lessons. The element (and the groups) have been replaced by popular web constructs. The first column is occupied by search engines, the fourth by aggregators, the eight by operating systems etc. The atomic weights seem to have been replaced by their internet traffic rankings. Cool Stuff!

The second visualization is a representation of key web trends (websites, companies, technologies etc) and their inter relationships with each other. It looks like a city road map (or like the route map for suburban trains). It is not easy to decipher though, and some of the inter-relationships do not seem obvious. Still this is certainly worth a casual look. This visualization has been created by a strategic design agency from Japan.

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For some strange reason, my blog post seems to be crashing if I put any hypelinks; think the wordpress code has gone corrupt; so here are the original URLs without the hyperlinks-

www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2007-06-23–periodic-table-of-the-internet.html

www.informationarchitects.jp/ia-trendmap-2007v2