Friday mornings

I'm missing my colleagues. We usually spend our Friday mornings looking at a Cam23 thing together and having a play. But they're not here today, so I'll blog about our experience of thing 11 - Slideshare. Like many of the sites and services we're being introduced to by the 23 things program, the initial homepage is quite scary - busy and off-putting and fills one with 'I don't know what to do'-ness. This is why it's great to have the Cam 23 team in the wings pushing us on to the stage like a proud parent. 'You can do it, Go on!' We have also learned the benefit of having simultaneous tabs open on our browsers, so that we can slip seamlessly from 'Cam 23 blog' to' thing to explore' without falling over or bursting into tears or wishing we had a print-out.

A question at an early stage is 'How do you add audio to a presentation to turn it into a screencast?' Hmm, getting ahead of ourselves there, maybe. The Heriot-Watt slideshows seem to be two years old, so we have a look at something a bit more recent - Phil Bradley on Facebook Privacy. 79 slides - we don't make it to the end.

While I'd love to share colleagues' slide presentations on various things, I'm probably more likely to do this in a local environment, so I expect if I use slideshare at all, it'll be by someone saying 'and if you want to see my slides for this presentation, I've posted them on slideshare'. But for 'slideshare', I guess I could read libraries@cambridge or the presenter's own website or any other number of sites, or get the slides as an email attachment. Coming to a slide presentation without actually having seen it presented, the presentation can often falter where you'd get a bit of witty repartee, and I find myself thinking 'and what would they have said while that slide was up?' Which I guess brings me back to the screencast question. I'm glad Slideshare is there, and I might enjoy ransacking it, but am unlikely to find 100% useful stuff - I think I'd want to be directed to something specific, either by its author or by a colleague for it to really grab me.

The Visual

I like Flickr. Can't quite yet see how I can use it usefully. And I'm a bit confused about what's freely available for use, and what isn't. Need to look into that a bit more carefully. It's enormously enjoyable to look at the pictures though - many are really quirky and different.

Three meetings

Google calendar - potentially useful. Actually irritating. Or is it just me? I find the display really confusing. I managed to enter the same meeting three times because no matter how many times I refreshed the page it didn't seem to be there. But then I went away and came back and it was there and now I don't know how to stop the calendar telling me that I have three meetings on July 6th at 11am. I suppose there's some comfort in knowing that they are exactly the same meeting and that I will be able to meet this triple-booking. Shades of Groundhog Day though...

Slow starter

Almost embarrassed to start posting a month late with thing 1. But better late than never, I suppose. I like igoogle and - look! - I can make it pretty too. But it has proved the tipping point for my home computer which now crashes every time I open my browser.