Thursday, January 28, 2010

Genealogy Presentations on Slideshare.net - DON'T USE IT!


NOTE - please do not click on SlideShare dot net - it is now a scam site per a correspondent.


Did you miss that genealogical conference or seminar that your genea-friends or favorite genea-blogger raved about? Do you want a primer on a certain genealogy topic?

There are several web sites where persons can submit their documents and presentations for persons to find and observe, and even listen to them. In earlier posts, I've highlighted several genealogy websites that have webinars online with audio of speakers and the presentation slides synched with the audio. www.Ancestry.com, www.FamilySearch.org and www.NewEnglandAncestors.org are three organizations that have webinars for observation on a person's own time - you don't have to "be there" when the presentation is given.

There are several sites that permit a person to freely add documents and presentations to their site for interested persons to observe the presentation slides. Some have an audio feature also. One such web site is www.SlideShare.net. Several genealogists are using this site to put their presentations online.

The www.SlideShare.net home page is shown below:




A person can register for a free account and upload their presentation to the site. The web site accepts the following file types:
Presentations: pdf, ppt, pps, pptx, ppsx, pot, potx (Powerpoint); odp (OpenOffice); key, zip (Apple Keynote).
Documents: pdf, doc, docx, rtf, xls (MSOffice); odt, ods(OpenOffice); Apple iWork Pages.
Max file size: 100MB for presentations & documents.
On any SlideShare page, the user can search for an author, a user, a topic, etc. I put "genealogy" in the Search box and it found over 1,000 presentations with the term "genealogy" in the presentation title or keyword. Here is the first page of one of my searches:



The fourth one down on that list is genea-blogger Mark Tucker's (www.ThinkGenealogy.com) presentation "Navigating Research with the Genealogical Proof Standard" presented in 2008. I clicked on the link and saw:


The familiar slide controls are below the slide show screen above - first slide, previous slide, play (automatic 5 seconds) next slide and last slide, page number and a link to show it full-screen. I clicked on the full screen link and saw:


Note that the slide show controls are still below the slides - that is pretty cool. I clicked the last slide button and saw:


If a presenter has more than one presentation, there is a tab to the right of the slide in the smaller-slide show screen - "More by user." I found out that Mark has two more presentations on the site:
What other genealogy bloggers have presentations on Slideshare.net? There are several users identified:
* Thomas MacEntee (username geneabloggers) has:
* Janet Iles (username researchergal) has:
* Jordan Jones (username genealogymedia) has:
There are a number of other persons and libraries that have put genealogy oriented presentations on the www.Slideshare.net site, and several persons have posted documents about specific family lines.
Go explore, enjoy reading the presentations that are of interest to you, and appreciate the efforts of these presenters. While, in most cases, you cannot hear what they said during the presentation, you can read what their slides say and understand the points they made.
Another web site with similar presentations posted online is Scribd - www.scribd.com. I will try to find genealogy presentations there in another post.
What other web sites with user-contributed genealogy presentation content are there? But not genealogy video like YouTube or RootsTelevision. Tell me!

4 comments:

Janet Iles said...

Thanks Randy for mentioning my slideshare offerings of workshops I have given. I will check the others that you have mentioned.

Elizabeth Thomas said...

Thanks for keeping us aware of all the sources we have available to learn new things.

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