Slidecast

» see slideshare.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

2007 is when SlideShare decided a slide deck should be able to speak. The feature was called Slidecast and the idea was simple enough to explain in a sentence: upload an audio file alongside your presentation and drag markers to say which slide belonged to which moment. The result played as one object, and anyone who hit the embed could sit through your talk without you being in the room.

This solved something real. A conference deck posted on its own is the worst possible artifact, forty slides of bullet fragments and a photo of a mountain, legible only to the people who already heard the voice over the top of it. Slidecast put the voice back. For a few years the better conference organizers posted slidecasts instead of raw decks, and a certain kind of consultant built an entire audience out of them.

SlideShare was bought by LinkedIn in 2012 for around $119 million, and Slidecast outlived that transaction by about two years. The retirement notice went up in early 2014 and was unusually direct about the cause, which companies rarely are: "While we have seen some great Slidecasts created, usage hasn't been as widespread as we had hoped, and we have decided to discontinue this feature on SlideShare."

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The timing put Slidecast in the middle of the web's one serious attempt at recorded audio before podcasting became an industry. Odeo was two years old and Google Video was still taking uploads, and the whole category of "put your talk on the internet" was unsettled. SlideShare's answer was that the slides were the primary object and the audio was an attachment, which is the opposite of how the world eventually went.

It also had an awkward dependency. Making a slidecast meant you had to have recorded yourself, cleanly, as an MP3, which in 2007 was a separate project with its own equipment problem. Everybody could make a deck. Far fewer people could make a deck plus a usable recording of themselves reading it, and that gap is most of the explanation for the usage numbers SlideShare was complaining about seven years later.

~ what got buried with it ~

The shutdown ran in two stages. From 28 February 2014 you could not create a new slidecast, which gave everyone two months of warning while their old ones kept playing. On 30 April the existing ones were converted into static presentations, both on slideshare.net and in every embed anywhere else on the web, and the original files could be pulled out of your My Uploads page up to that date.

That conversion is gentler than most endings in this archive and it is still a loss with a specific shape. The decks survived. The talks did not. Every page on the internet that had embedded a narrated presentation kept working and quietly went silent, and because nothing visibly broke, almost nobody noticed. A teacher who had posted a lecture in 2009 would find, if they went back, a perfectly functional set of slides with no lecture in it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »