My experiences with Slideshare mainly revolve around Tony Hirst who is a long-time user. Yes, 4 years IS a long time by today's standards.
Tony spoke at this year's libraries@cambridge conference, albeit virtually via YouTube because of the snow! So I thought I would look him up on Slideshare. I came across his first ever upload from 25/10/06 called 'Intro to Social Networking'. It provides a fantastic little snap-shot of how we were thinking 4 years ago in terms of social media:
Take a gander through the above and try to cast your mind back to November 2006. Let me jog your memory: 2006 saw Russia cutting natural gas to the Ukraine over a price dispute, the Winter Olympics were held in Turin, the Football World Cup took place in Germany and poor Steve Irwin (Crocodile Hunter) met his untimely death.
A couple of thoughts for you: Were you on Facebook in 2006? I wasn't. Had you any idea that Delicious was anything other than a good way to describe ice cream? Nope. If you'd seen the word Flickr would you have just thought 'that's spelt wrongly'. Yup!
What I'm trying to say is that things are moving so quickly nowadays, sites like Slideshare can be a valuable archive of material that might otherwise get lost in the mists of time. If you produce a PowerPoint presentation, how long would you keep it for before you deleted it, thinking it obsolete, or updated it replacing much of the original content?
The above presentation is an interesting touchstone to make you think about how far we've come in a short space of time. It might also make you think about the future...?
I joined Facebook when it was limited to ac.uk addresses but saw on Tony's presentation networking resources which had a lifespan of a mayfly. Am still a member of Friends Reunited and have not used it for years. However, details posted by friends and family can be retrieved years after, like Slideshare presentations, anything posted on the web may bubble up. What with Library of Congress archiving Tweets I am now considering very carefully the tone of posts to social networking websites
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting point which I haven't seen anyone else raise - Slideshare as an archive of your presentations. I never thought of it like that!
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