Sharing what I have been learning about sharing audio synched to slides for talks #Slideshare #Youtube #SciVee

As many of you must know, I like to share. Sort of an open science thing. Sort of an ego thing. But I like to share my papers, and data and even my talks. Going about sharing ones talks is not completely straightforward alas. A few years ago I started using a really nice tool called Slideshare which is one of many site/systems out there for sharing slides from talks. I have I posted many presentations on slideshare over the years and continue to do so. It has some nice embed functions for example and thus I can put a little flash version of my talk from a few days ago right here in my post

DNA and the hidden world of microbes

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And they have some social features there which are also really nice. But slides are, well, just slides. Much better would be to include audio along with slides.



So recently I have been trying to record audio from talks and post it with my slides. Slideshare has a way to link the audio to the slides so I can then embed a flash presentation with the audio like below:

Phylogenomics, Microbes, Yada Yada Yada - Talk by Jeisen at JCVI 1/18/11

View another webinar from Jonathan Eisen

Of course, some might complain about the focus on Flash for the embedding (which means many apple phones and computers cannot view them but it is still nice to have the embed functions there. But alas, there is one major limitation. The method for synching audio to slides in Slideshare is really painful. It takes forever to do and is cumbersome. Hopefully they will add other options for doing the synching that are less painful. So what I have been doing recently has been to give my presentations using the Keynote software on my Macbook and to use the "Record Slideshow" option which records the audio as well as the slide transition timing. So I did that for my latest talk and then uploaded the video of the slideshow (with audio) to Youtube which allows me to embed it here too:

 I also uploaded it to SciVee.tv here:

 

Not sure which is going to be a better option for slideshows with audio but am experimenting here. Any suggestions for other ways to record audio in synch with slides and to share that with people would be welcome.