CILIP | Q&A Phil Bradley

Q Could you suggest any resources I could use to put my presentations on to the web?

A You don’t say what sort of presentations you’re referring to, but I’ll go out on a limb here and guess you’re talking PowerPoint. There are a number of good sites that allow you to upload presentations and make them available to either the world or in some cases small groups, embed them in other places and allow commentary. My personal favourite is Slideshare (www.slideshare.net – and you can see my own collection by adding /Philbradley/ to that address), but another good one is Authorstream (www.authorstream.com/). SlideRocket (www.sliderocket.com) is currently in closed beta but looks promising. Finally, you could always upload to a Google email account and get access to the presentations that way.

Q I read somewhere that Google is experimenting with changing the layout of the results on its pages, but I’ve looked at the site and can’t find any information on this. Do you know anything about this?

A The best place to go in order to see what Google is experimenting with is the Google Labs page (www.google.com/experimental/). It is currently playing around with timelines, maps and so on. There are also other experiments on suggested terms, and keyboard shortcuts, and you can join any of these experiments yourself by following the instructions on the page.

Q I have just bought a new memory stick with a huge amount of space on it. Apart from saving data to it, what else could I do with it?

A I know exactly what you mean – I bought one recently with 4 GB on it, and I’ll never fill that with data. However, there are lots of applications that you can put on to it, such as a browser, email client, office suite, instant messenger and so on. One site that I looked at briefly was ‘Portable applications’ (www.app-stick.com/), which lists a fair number of options together with links to the appropriate sites. It’s certainly worth checking out – and making your memory stick work a little harder!

Site of the month
My site of the month is called reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net/). A ‘captcha’ is short for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’ and that’s the name given to those funny little boxes you find on websites where you have to type in the characters that you see before you can send a comment or whatever. What this site is doing is trying to digitise books, one word at a time. It’s a very interesting project, it can reduce the spam you get from your site or in your email and it’s doing good things. Even if you don’t use it yourself, it’s worth looking at out of interest.

Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. Phil’s How to use Web 2.0 in your library (Facet) provides ideas and suggestions on providing new services for users. Email any questions about the internet to philb@philb.com (subject line: ‘column query’).

Updated: 28 April 2008