# Slideshare has great customer support 


**Why use [Slideshare](http://slideshare.com "SlideShare")?**\
A lot of people have began posting their slides to Slideshare for
sharing with others. In many ways, Slideshare makes more sense to me
than for example [Scribd](http://scribd.com "Scribd") - it's fairly easy
for me to download a PDF and view it in my local viewer, but it's a pain
to have to start
[OpenOffice](http://www.openoffice.org/ "OpenOffice.org") just to view a
Powerpoint. In addition, Slideshare has an incredibly neat feature
called Slidecasting, which lets you add an mp3 of the actual talk (or of
music, if you wanted to make a photo slideshow), and sync the transition
of the slides to the relevant points in the audio. This way people can
hear you speak and see the slides change at the appropriate points,
without you having to compile it all into a large video file.

**[![](http://public.slideshare.net/images/redesign/slideshare.gif)](http://www.slideshare.net)**It's
also getting easier and easier to produce an audio file - I normally
just turn on [Audacity](http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ "Audacity") on
my laptop before I start speaking. The sound becomes a bit noisy, but
with the remove noise feature in Audacity, the end-result is
surprisingly good. I've put several presentations up, but my first
slidecast was [my presentation on open research and open
education](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/08/14/talk-at-iipa-in-delhi-on-open-research-oer-and-open-learning-in-developing-countries-slidecast/)
which I gave this summer in New Delhi. That presentation vividly
illustrates how with a little bit of extra work, your presentation can
have a much wider reach. The presentation was given at the [Indian
Institute of Public Administration](http://www.iipa.ernet.in/), which is
where top bureaucrats go to get mid-career training, and I spoke to a
group of 25 professors. It was a real honor to be invited, and they had
some interesting questions after the talk. However, by putting [the
slidecast](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang/open-research-open-educational-resources-and-open-learning-presentation-at-iipa-delhi-554807)
up on Slideshare, I was able to share it with the world.

During the last half year, that slidecast received almost 1.500 hits,
and I know that a number of people saw it, and that it benefitted me.
For example, I would probably not be giving a [presentation on open
education](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/01/25/upcoming-presentation-open-education-around-the-world/)
at the Education Commons at OISE, if the people working there hadn't
seen this earlier presentation and decided that although I was a first
year MA student, I knew how to present. This can be especially important
for students and beginning academics who don't have a lot of formal
publications. But even if you do - knowing how to write, and knowing how
to present are two different skills.

**Problems, and good customer support\
**I was especially excited about putting my recent presentation from the
Connexions/OCWC Conference online
([abstract](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/01/25/global-concept-local-practices-state-of-the-research-on-ocw-in-chinese/),
[slidecast](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/02/12/presentation-on-opencourseware-in-china-posted-to-slideshare/))
because this was on a fairly specialized topic about which almost no
information is available in English. Whereas the previous presentation
was a general overview of OER and open research, which would not be very
interesting to people already inside the movement, this presentation was
"cutting edge" research. Not that many people attended my presentation
in Houston, because there were competing tracks (I was competing with
David Wiley, no less), but several already told me that they were
interested.

However, when trying to set the timings of the Slidecast, I ran into
problems. It seemed like save did not work, and the timings did not show
up. I tried a variety of different things, like reuploading it in a
different format, but I could not get it to work. I looked around to see
if there was another webservice that could let me do the same, but I
couldn't easily find one. My other option would have been to turn it
into a "movie", but that seemed like a waste. Even Keynote, which
supports creating Flash-movies with narration, doesn't let you do it
with an existing MP3, you have to record from scratch.

So I finally sent off an email to the support desk at Slideshare.net,
not expecting much. After all, I was not a paying customer, and I wasn't
expecting much of an answer. I was positively surprised when I received
an email back, quite soon after, suggesting that I delete cookies and
temporary files. I did, and it had no effect. Back to Slideshare. It
actually took us a while to figure out what was going on, in total my
GMail conversation thread shows that 18 messages went back and forth
during 24 hours. The wonderful part was that on the other end was a
high-level technician who treated me as a valued collaborator in hunting
down this bug. I sent screenshots, tried different techniques, and at
one point even used Firebug to look at the XML files sent to my browser.
Finally we nailed it, there had been some bug in importing my specific
presentation, and the thing was fixed.

In this age of calling customer support and being told by someone to
"reboot your computer", it is wonderful to be dealing with someone who
has a deep understanding of how their system works, and who treats you
as an intelligent person. Thank you very much to Ashwan, and anyone else
who were involved.

(And the [slidecast is now
available](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/02/12/presentation-on-opencourseware-in-china-posted-to-slideshare/)!)

**Suggestion\
**One thing that I would love to see is more detailed analytical data. I
know that 1.500 people have visited my presentation, but how many of
them actually watched it, and how many clicked on a link, saw the first
slide, and left? Youtube has quite detailed analytics about when in a
movie people stop watching, etc. We wouldn't need something that fancy,
but perhaps "350 people watched at least half the slides in your
presentation", or "400 people spent more than 10 minutes on your
presentation". Since Slideshare serves up each slide as people move
along (I'm assuming), they should be able to tell with a good enough
accuracy.\

Stian