Abstract
In this post I have tested several solutions for slide sharing. I found the free product of SlideBoom to be superior.

Introduction
Scientific presentations are nowadays delivered in a form where the focus is on the presentation of slides. Old-fashioned people claim  – and complain – that a presentation with blackboard and chalk is a much better form of communication. This almost obsolete style is to be preferred in a limited number of cases only. For instance when you are lecturing to students and you really want to go slowly through a sequential line of arguments, like a full mathematical derivation. In all other cases the era of PowerPoint is a blessing. Both for presenters and for audiences.

The digital formats of a slide presentation allows for reuse by the presenter himself, and for reuse by others. Slide sharing is becoming fashionable. In this post I limit myself to the sharing of the presentation file. So I am not discussing full-blown video presentations.

How can we one make the presentation files available to one’s colleagues? One way is posting the, let us say PowerPoint, file on the web and let any interested colleagues just download the file. This posting has several disadvantages. The most important being that you have lost any control over your presentation. In the extreme case people could change names of authors and redistribute. Or more likely copy your skillfully prepared didactic slide without ever giving you credit. Turning your PowerPoint file into a pdf solves this problem partially, but then all animation is lost. Another disadvantage of allowing downloading the bare presentation file is that these files tend to get large, easily up to 15 MB. If you store them on our own server, traffic might slow down tremendously. And if you back up your server through a slow ftp-Internet connection you sure will get in trouble.

Happily there are companies that supply on-line viewing of your slides. If these web interfaces would be of high quality that would solve all your storing and speed problems. The file is downloaded to their site and they take care of the back-up. And in addition they allow you to use settings such that you can prohibit the downloading of your file. These organizations have developed software that converts presentation files into files that can be viewed using their on-line slide-viewer. In addition this slide viewer can be embedded in web pages and personal blogs.

So I decided to test a few of the most popular slide-sharing Internet sites. I used a presentation typical for scientists: with some animation and with non-standard bullets – that is the bullets are pictures. For this purpose I used the presentation discussed in an earlier post, with a few minor alterations.

SlideShare
The name SlideShare is brilliantly chosen. It is the first that any search machine throws up when being fed with the search string “sharing slides”. Unfortunately when I uploaded my file (tried over and over again) only a part of my slides were uploaded, although the whole presentation was way under the maximum size limit. In addition all bulleted lists were mutilated. The final result was awful. Even if SlideShare would improve their product I would hesitate to use it. People that market such low-quality software deserve to be banned.

Google Docs
Sharing on-line documents with Google Docs is quite sophisticated. It allows multiple users editing the file at the same time. The basic document formats supported by Google Docs are word-processing (MS Word-like), spreadsheet (MS Excel-like) and presentation (PowerPoint-like) formats. For this post only the presentation format is relevant. I will be short: Google Docs on-line sharing of PowerPoint presentations competes with SlideShare for the lowest ranking. Unbelievable that such trash is produced by such supposedly good programmers.

AuthorSTREAM
So I tried another company: AuthorSTREAM. The product is better than SlideShare, but again all bulleted lists were ill represented.

SlideBoom
I got a little desperate. But I decided not to give up. Then I discovered SlideBoom. What  a pleasant surprise. Fast downloading, fast processing, and superior slide-view facilities. They have a limit of 20 uploaded presentations. Uploading more presentations would cost you money. I assume this number is fine for many individual scientists. And you do not have to be a rocket scientist to extend this limit yourself. I used the same presentation I used before, with some minor changes. Note: the black filled rectangle on the bottom has as purpose to prevent putting information there. Information that otherwise would not be visible for people sitting in the back.

Note:

Feature Request
To improve on the SlideBoom functionality I would like the following feature: each slide should have the possibility for the author to give comments and ideally also for readers.

Microsoft
Microsoft has announced it will introduce on-line MS Office services, meant to compete with Google Docs. As I outlined above beating Google Docs for the PowerPoint format will be easy cake, certainly for Microsoft.

Alternatives
I will send both SlideShare and AutoSTREAM the above comments. My experience with arrogant Google is that they will never answer any suggestion. They suffer severely from the “not-invented here syndrome”.

If you know a good alternative for slide sharing  I, and our readers, would appreciate to hear about this.

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