WebSlides - Transforms Bookmarks Once Again

We received a nice exclusive from Diigo the social bookmarking beta about their latest release WebSlides. This innovation is a browser based player that displays live Web pages with integrated annotation, sticky notes and highlights in an interactive slideshow. With this cool tool users can record and narrate tracks as well as add background music to make compelling shows - and somewhat more. WebSlides is being presented at the Office 2.0 Conference as I write this, so we wanted you to have a look at this simple, innovative and useful tool as well.  

Links and Links

Web 2.0 has to a large extent been about new ways of organizing and manipulating data. This is particularly true of bookmarks and other links. Innovative developments like Second Brain, Particls and others have pushed the envelope in creating useful and fascinating ways for organizing all types of links and data. Well, testing this little tool makes me wonder why someone did not think of this before (I - know just comment and tell us about your service too). WebSlides is like StumbleUpon in motion actually. It does not yet have the ”resident” features of SU, but WebSlide creations saved or submitted to other services will exhibit a similar feel. So just when we thought StumbleUpon and a host of others had done everything with pages - along comes WebSlides. Here is a short list of things users might do with this service.

• Create guided tours of websites
• Display a list of houses or other products to clients
• Bundle education resources or research data
• Make shows of favorite places when visiting or traveling
• Create briefings or tutorials and tours on virtually any subject
• Present a whole series of news stories on a topic to digg or del.icio.us and others for scrutiny
• Interactively submit “collections” of stories and data

A demo creation illustrating multi function player UI at the bottom - list of pages pulled up 

Conclusion

WebSlides is not yet available for testing so we could not get in depth information on the slide creation UI and other features. However, the demo presentations are fairly awesome in presenting selections with music. I can think of at least 10 other uses for this tool - one of which might be used to rate news stories in collections (with voting). If the developers continue to improve on the exceptional “in show” page functionality - then WebSlides will be quite something. This service is deceptively simple in appearance, but making web pages functional within a relatively interactive slide show is not a simple feature. I like WebSlides and look forward to testing the service and also seeing how it is enhanced in the coming months. Combined with Diigo's other services, this fascinating tool could go viral quickly in my estimation. Check it out and perhaps comment on your ideas for its uses.

Sharing pulled up from within a page - within a WebSlide - fascinating!