How to post a presentation?

Giving presentations at conferences or seminar series is a vital part of a researcher's professional life.  Listening to others' presentations is also one of the best ways to stay current with the frontier of a research field. While the audience in conference/seminar room is often limited, a presentation posted online can be virtually viewed by any interested audience. At iMechanica, users have started to post their presentation slides, quite often as the attachments of a post briefing the presentation.  Such a way is simple and effective, but may not be the best way for everyone for the following reasons:

• Most presenters prefer a broader audience, but not everyone is willing to provide downloadable slides;
• Many enjoy viewing others' presentations, but not every presentation is worthy to download.

| View | Upload your own

The above concerns can be solved by embedding the presentation directly in a webpage (see above).  There are several free web services allowing posting presentations online.  Here I'll share with you some of my experience with SlideShare .

Some features of SlideShare include:

• SlideShare allows posting presentations from PowerPoint, OpenOffice.org Impress, and PDF files;
• With a YouTube-type interface, SlideShare allows user to tag, rate, comment, and embed;
• User who uploads a presentation can choose to make the slides  view only (default) or downloadable;
• SlideShare is linked with Creative Commons so various attribution licenses are supported.

Like YouTube videos, once posted, a presentation can be viewed via SlideShare webpage or can be embeded in external webpages.  The instructions at SlideShare are clear and easy-to-follow. Embedding a presentation in iMechanica is pretty much similiar to embedding a video .

Another feature of SlideShare is SlideCasts , that is, to mix your presentation slides with the presentation audio file (mp3 format, like a podcast).  SlideCasts can make online presentations more effective and vivid. I haven't tried out such a feature, thus welcome anyone sharing their experience on this regard.