On Line Presentation Tools: Slideshare Vs Slideboom

I have always been a big fan of Slideshare, I think it’s a great way to embed PowerPoint or Keynote presentations into Blogs and other websites. It’s also a really good way to share presentations with students that don’t have PowerPoint or Keynote on their own computer – as its web based it is completely cross platform.

Slideboom seems to be the latest embeddable on-line presentation tool on the Internet. I was going to give it a try by uploading my How to Make Games Based Learning Work in Secondary Schools Presentation to it – however I was faced with this message:

At the moment with Slideshare you can up-load presentations up to 100mb in size. However, not willing to give up straight away I up-loaded a shorter presentation that I have been working on for the Royal Metrological Society on Atmosphere to both Slideshare and Slideboom.

Initially, I was very impressed with how quickly Slideboom converted my file from a PowerPoint to a Slideboom Presentation. However Slideshare only took about one minute longer and I suspect that Slideshare has more users and therefore its servers are likely to be busier.

Have a look at the two presentations below and then I’ll draw you to a couple of the slides to compare:

A) The Slideshare Presentation:

Factors That Influence Climate On A Global Scale Slideshare

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: geography olliebray)

B) The Slideboom Presentation:

 

1) You will notice that Slideboom keeps all of the custom animations from the PowerPoint presentation. If you compare slide 3 on both presentations you will notice that the three paragraphs on the Slideboom presentation appear individually where as on the Slideshare presentation all of the content appears at once.

2) The showing of custom animations is particularly powerful when you compare the more complicated slides in the presentation such as slides 11 and 16.

3) Slideboom also plays the animated .gifs within the presentation. If you compare slide 4 on both presentations you will see the sun is moving in the Slideboom presentation but static in the Slideshare presentation.

4) Slideboom doesn’t like flash animations that are embedded in the presentation. For example if you look at slide 17 Slideboom shows this slide as a large white cross (untidy) where as Slideshare converts the flash animation into a static picture.

So will I be transferring over to Slideboom? Not at the moment, for me its up-load capacity of 30mb is just too small – although I do think it has some potential and I will be watching it develop with interest over the coming months. It will also be interesting to see the up-grades that occur on Slideshare, now that it has some real competition.

Comments

[jaye richards]

A useful comparison - just wondering if you've tried sliderocket, and what you think of it if you have ?

[Neil Winton]

Hi Ollie,
Jaye's beaten me to the obvious thought. I'm moving over to using sliderocket (http://sliderocket.com) and/or 280slides (http://280slides.com/). They are both much prettier than powerpoint, and they have the added benefit of being completely online so accessable and useable anywhere there is an internet connection.

Both will allow you to import powerpoint slides, so you might want to try uploading one and seeing what you think. Failing that, you might want to try creating one from scratch...

I'm gradually moving more and more things online, thus saving me a fortune in software costs. Even better because their computers do all the hard work so you don't need a particularly high spec machine to access them... so again, this is a measure that could save schools considerable sums of money!

[Neil Winton]

Update: Here are a couple of links for you to see the differences...

http://app.sliderocket.com/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=A99DB48E-F495-45FD-3EF4-10E1BD1B3172

http://280slides.com/Viewer/?user=1499&name=OllieTester&fullscreen

Enjoy!

[OllieBray]

Hi Jaye and Neil - I'll have a good look at Slide Rocket, its one of those (many) sites I've not got round to having agood look at yet!

And Neil, thanks for my custom preview of both!

We must get a date for the Internet Safety Workshop?

OB

[Elaine Talbert]

I will be sticking with SlideShare, it has served me very well! I have come to know many bloggerati and twitterati from SlideShare. I love the ease of groups, tags etc. I run a search through Google Reader and I star the best web2.0 work from around the world.This service has formed the basis of my PLN well before I jumped onto Twitter. Elaine

[amit]

How about including the other players like zoho-show, wondershare and authorstream in this comparison.

[Slava Uskov]

Hi Ollie,

SlideBoom allows to upload presentations up to 100 mb in size now. You can also easily upload presentations with flash, audio and video using a free PowerPoint add-in for SlideBoom.

Take a look at SlideBoom again and you will see that it can give you more than Slideshare.

[Ollie Bray]

Slava, thanks for the tip off - looking forward to checking this out! OB

[Bernard]

Many of them think SlideShare is the only ppt sharing portal, there are many others like

http://www.slideserve.com
http://www.slideboom.com
http://www.authorstream.com

[miky]

among the above sites I found SlideServe better. I'm moving over to using SlideServe.