i mentioned the guardian’s 100 top web sites guide and said i was going to check out two. i have already followed up on one, but the other was 280slides. anyway it rocks!
it’s basically an online presentation tool. you can create the equivalent of powerpoint or keynote and then embed or share the presentation with others. in fact you can also upload from powerpoint oir whatever if you want to. i know google applications does something similar and there may well be other tools out there.
i can see it being of use for a few reasons:
- being on the phone or web talking about an idea to someone elsewhere who can click through the slides.
- being able to access your presentations anywhere there is internet
- creating presentations to embed neatly in a web site.
- creating a presentation that you can just send people a link to rather than sending the whole thing
the subject matter may not be of interest but as an example i created a family slideshow meets newsletter that i sent to friends and family this year for christmas. i have used flickr before for slides but this was a good excuse to try 280slides.
then i have taken on the role of being web master for the ealing photography group (hope you like my re-design so far). it’s meant i have had to teach myself a bit about stylesheets/css but that’s a good thing. the previous version of the site had a lot of galleries that must have taken hours for the web master to edit and upload. so… my approach is to suggest people create a slideshow with something like 280slides or flickr so that i can just embed it in a page and then they can create a new show when they like. less work for me, more control and responsibility for them. here’s an example of what a page looks like for this (it’s only got a few slides in).
to explain how to create a slideshow i have created a slideshow so if it’s of interest here’s a very hasty idiot’s guide to 280slides…
one concern i had was around their blurb on copyright so i e-mailed them about this and got the following e-mail from ross boucher which re-assured me and may do you…
This language, however, does not grant us the copyright to the work, it only grants the right to 280 North to use that content in any way we deem necessary.
I can give you my personal assurance (which I would understand if it wasn’t completely comforting) that we would never try to “steal” or make money off other people’s content, except, as I said, in the form of an advertisement for 280 Slides. I’ll also tell you that its incredibly unlikely we will do any such advertisement in the future.
As for changing the language, it’s something I’d be willing to do, but we don’t have the resources to spend on it with our lawyer. If you have suggestions on specific language, I can take a look and maybe we could update the terms.
[update: broken links]