Today, SlideShare announced a very LinkedIn-style feature for its service. The new feature, called “Send Tracker,” is an analytics tool that will allow users to gather metrics on how people use Slide Share presentations. For example, the software could report back on who viewed a presentation and how much time they spent on each slide. It can also send alerts when people click through emails or view SlideShare content.

The feature is geared toward marketers and salespeople, so that they can observe potential customers and focus their time on prospects who engaged well with a presentation. It’s a free feature for subscribers to SlideShare’s premium “SlideShare Pro” service.

As expected, SlideShare has prepared a slideshow that covers the highlights of the new feature. The SlideShare presentation is embedded below, and it probably uses Send Tracker analytics to send data back to SlideShare. I’ll leave it up to each reader to decide whether they consider their SlideShare viewing habits private, and engage with the presentation accordingly.

“A year and a half ago, we released completely new document, spreadsheet and drawing editors. Google Docs has been picking up speed ever since with more than 60 new features and millions of new users,” says software engineer Steven Saviano on the official Google Blog. “Today we’re rounding out the suite by previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.”

“Presentations are made to be shared—whether it’s presenting your thesis to your professors or inspiring colleagues at a conference,” he adds. “And the best presentations are made together, collaborating with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience.”

With the new version, presentations can be created by more than one person simultaneously, and you can see exactly what others are working on with “presence markers”. Teams can edit simultaneously, and there is a revision history feature so you can see who made changes or revert to earlier versions. There is also a built-in chat feature. Are we seeing some Google Wave creep in here?

Google says it’s gradually rolling out the new version of Presentations, but you can use it now if you go to Document Settings, click the editing tab, and check the box next to “Create new presentations using the latest version of the presentation editor.”

Google says you’ll need a “modern browser” if you want to be able to edit with the new version.

Google also says more collaboration features are on the way.

"BlackBerry Presenter helps simplify the presentation experience by allowing professionals to lighten their travel load and leave their laptops back at the office," says RIM’s Douglas Soltys.

The device includes a loop mode, which lets you set the time between slides and leave it running as you deliver a presentation. It also has a Freeze mode, which will freeze a slide on-screen while you browse through the rest of your presentation on your smartphone. It supports PowerPoint effects, Bluetooth connection, and is compatible with multiple online video formats.

Here’s what it looks like:

RIM lists the following as system requirements for the device:

1. Video output device and a VGA cable or an S-Video cable.

2. BlackBerry Presenter is not supported by the BlackBerry Curve 8300 Series and/or BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8200 Series smartphones.

3. Upgrading BlackBerry Presenter firmware requires (a) an Intel compatible computer with an available USB port that is compliant with USB 1.1 or higher and that is running the Microsoft Windows XP or later operating system and (b) BlackBerry Device Software v4.6 or later.

BlackBerry Presenter Specs:

Physical Dimensions (LxWxH)
3.4 x 2.4 x 0.9 inches (86 x 60 x 23 mm)

Languages Supported:
English, French, Italian,
German, Spanish

Video Formats Supported:
NTSC, PAL

Video Cable Support:
S-Video, VGA

Power Connections:
USB

Display Resolution Support:
640×480 (VGA), 800×600
(SVGA), or 1024×768 (XGA)

Bluetooth:
Version 2.0 + EDR, Class 1.5

Carrying Case:
Synthetic Leather

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Since Google dominates the search market share by such a large market share, it is always a good idea to listen to what they have to say about such matters. So when they post a presentation with tips on optimizing crawling and indexing, you’ll probably want to pay attention.

Google has done just that, highlighting things to stay away from, and things you can do to enhance your site’s crawlability. Here is that presentation with specific examples of URLs.

"The Internet is a big place; new content is being created all the time," says Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa. "Google has a finite number of resources, so when faced with the nearly-infinite quantity of content that’s available online, Googlebot is only able to find and crawl a percentage of that content. Then, of the content we’ve crawled, we’re only able to index a portion."

"URLs are like the bridges between your website and a search engine’s crawler: crawlers need to be able to find and cross those bridges (i.e., find and crawl your URLs) in order to get to your site’s content," continues Moskwa. "If your URLs are complicated or redundant, crawlers are going to spend time tracing and retracing their steps; if your URLs are organized and lead directly to distinct content, crawlers can spend their time accessing your content rather than crawling through empty pages, or crawling the same content over and over via different URLs."

If you want to get crawled faster by Google, you should remove user-specific details from URLs. Specifics of this can be viewed in the slideshow.  Basically, URL parameters that don’t change the content of the page, should be removed and put into a cookie. This will reduce the number of URLs that point to the same content, and speed up crawling.

Google says infinite spaces are a waste of time and bandwidth for all, which is why you should consider taking action when you have calendars that link to infinite numbers of past/future dates with unique URLs, or other paginated data.

Tell Google to ignore pages it can’t crawl. This includes things like log-in pages, contact forms, shopping carts, and other pages that require users to perform actions that crawlers can’t perform themselves. You can do this with the robots.txt file.

Finally, avoid duplicate content when possible. Google likes to have one URL for each piece of content. They do recognize that this is not always possible though (because of content management systems and what have you), which is why the canonical link element exists to let you specify the preferred URL for a particular piece of content.

Users can insert a table into their presentation, then easily add, select, and resize rows and columns, format and align text across the table, and set background colors for cells and borders. Rows will resize themselves to fit content.  Google provides the following example table:

Collaborators on presentations can make edits to the same table at the same time. When tables are imported from PowerPoint, they’ll show up as editable tables in Google Docs.

To use the Table tool, simply choose "Table" in the presentation editor. Then click "insert table." Select the dimensions. At that point, it will appear and you can start editing it.

To add rows and columns Google provides the following instructions:

1. Point your mouse to the outside borders of the table and a ‘+’ sign and an arrow appear.

2. Click the ‘+’ sign to add a row or column. The signs appear on both ends of a row or column, depending on which side of the cell your mouse is closer to. This determines where the row or column is added.

3. If you click the ‘+’ sign at the top of a column, another column appears. If you click the ‘+’ sign next to a row, another row appears.

To Select Cells:

-   Select an entire row or column: Point your mouse to the outside borders of the table and a ‘+’ sign and an arrow appear. Click the arrow to select a row or column. If you point your mouse to a column, you’ll select the column. If you point your mouse to a row, you’ll select the row.

- Select a range of cells: Drag your mouse from one cell to another to select multiple cells. To select a single cell, drag the mouse out of that cell and back into it.

Once you’ve selected cells, you can apply formatting changes to all of them at once by pressing the delete key. More info on adding and editing tables can be found here.

"That led me to a personal goal for 2009: if I give a substantial conference presentation (not just a question and answer session), I’d like to digitize the talk so that people who couldn’t attend the conference can still watch the presentation." This should make many webmasters happy, particularly those who hang on Matt’s every word.

Cutts starts by offering this 20-minute video recapping his "Preventing Virtual Blight" presentation from the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that took place in November. This "director’s cut" was filmed a little bit later at the Googleplex:

Well, that’s not the same as attending a conference right? You don’t have his slides to look at and help you learn visually. Oh wait a minute, he provided those too:

A lot of people are going to be greatly appreciative if Cutts does this with all his presentations. Perhaps he will inspire other presenters to follow suit, making more great conference info available for free from the comfort of one’s own computer (or phone). I don’t know how thrilled conference sponsors will be if this becomes a popular trend, but these things are always liveblogged, reported on, Tweeted about, etc. anyway. This way, you know you’re getting the entire presentation as it was intended.

Presumably, this takes advantage of features developed for Google Docs’ upcoming Google Presentations software, which is supposed to release sometime this summer, or even uses some of the tech acquired from Tonic Systems earlier this year.

Perhaps someone at Google could explain why they don’t support Microsoft Office 2007 formats yet, either for previewing or sending to Google Docs, when the beta was released over a year ago, and the software has been sold since November? This screenshot should have links to View As HTML and Open as a Google Document, as shown in Ionut Alex’s screenshot of what Gmail does with .DOC files, but Gmail doesn’t support .DOCX yet. Why not? There’s been plenty of time.

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Google Apps Not Ready For Prime Time

Much has been made of Google’s ongoing assembly of a variety of homegrown and acquired online applications into a full-blown productivity suite. Every time a new component is announced, with PowerPoint-like presentations the latest one on Google’s schedule, we all run off to write the ‘Microsoft killer’ story.

One person has been working with Google Apps for over six months. He has about a hundred people livening up his day with the usual user requests. Garett Rogers is not the typical domain admin; Google followers should recognize him from his Googling Google blog on ZDNet.

His observations indicate Gmail as part of Google Apps is just not ready for a business that has been using Outlook for years. Getting mail from Gmail to the desktop email client has been a path fraught with peril:

Then you have users who “don’t get some mail”

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/google-apps-not-ready-for-prime-time-2007-04/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/demo-of-googles-powerpoint-like-tool-2007-04 http://www.webpronews.com/demo-of-googles-powerpoint-like-tool-2007-04#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:29:56 +0000 Nathan Weinberg http://www.webpronews.com/?p=37083 Tonic Systems has a demo of their TonicPoint presentations software, the software Google has just purchased to become its presentations software. Enjoy!]]> Tonic Systems has a demo of their TonicPoint presentations software, the software Google has just purchased to become its presentations software. Enjoy!

Found via a post on Ajaxian from December.

If you can extract and download the movie, and send it to me, please do. I’m concerned Google overlooked this and left it online, and it will be yanked soon.

Also, turns out Google unveiled this at the Web 2.0 Expo. Google+treads+on+PowerPoint+turf/2100-1032_3-6176889.html”>Elinor Mills has more. A selection:

Schmidt gave a short presentation made using the new feature, which he said would be launched soon. He offered no specific timeframe.

“It’s a way of doing presentations,” he said in a keynote address. “Collaboration is a killer app for how communities work.”

Asked by author and blogger John Battelle if Google’s enhanced Docs & Spreadsheets would compete with Microsoft Office, Schmidt said, “We don’t think so. It doesn’t have all the functionality, nor is it intended to have the functionality of products like Microsoft Office.”

“Come on! It’s a competitor to Microsoft Office,” Battelle said, prompting a round of applause from a concurring audience. “This provides (people) with a free alternative, which has got to be considered a threat” to Microsoft.

Go John! Someone’s sick of Google’s PR doublespeak bullshit. To pretend you aren’t a competitor is just stupid.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/demo-of-googles-powerpoint-like-tool-2007-04/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/google-drinks-tonic-readies-presentations-2007-04 http://www.webpronews.com/google-drinks-tonic-readies-presentations-2007-04#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 23:34:11 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=37072 Google added another piece to their Frankenstein-ish productivity suite by acquiring Tonic Systems for its technology, which will allow Google to add a PowerPoint competitor to its Docs & Spreadsheets product.

Hold the blog posts, it’s not really a PowerPoint competitor. Just ask Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who told that to Web 2.0 Expo attendees, as Dan Farber noted:

“We don’t think its a competitor to Microsoft Office,” Schmidt said. “It’s casual and sharing and a better fit to how people use the Web. My guess is many companies in the audience are building products like this or other variants of this using the emerging architecture.”

As Good Morning Silicon Valley writer John Murrell put it: “Too coy by half, Eric, even if you don’t want to bill it as an Office Killer. It’s not like you’re fooling Microsoft.”

Whether it’s direct competition or simply a spirited response to the demand for web applications, Google will have presentation software available this summer, according to Google engineering director Sam Schillace:

First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Google offers its productivity software for free online. Microsoft is rumored to have a similar version of Office in the works for the web. We aren’t sure if that will ever happen, considering how Office is one of Microsoft’s main revenue sources.

To compete with Google, Microsoft is almost forced to make those applications free, or bundle them with existing offerings like Office Live, or even as a perk for their AdCenter search advertising customers.

Of course, Google will already have their suite available when the presentation side of the product launches in a few months.

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