Saturday, October 03, 2009

Free online services to bring more value to your blog

Buzz this
In this post I want to suggest you some free online services which help you to bring more value to your blog, adding valuable content in your posts such as documents preview, live presentations (PowerPoint-like) and screencasts.

If you know other similar services please suggest them adding a comment. Thanks!

Embed your documents in your posts with Scribd
If you want to share the content of an eBook you wrote, a good idea can be provide a preview of its pages in your posts using Scribd. Scribd is a very interesting service to put your documents on-line and republish them using iPaper format, a light alternative to PDF. The only thing you have to do is creating an account (it's free) and upload your documents. Every document will be converted immediatly in a iPaper file (it's a Flash file) which you can embed in your post. This is the result on your page:


The Woork Handbook

Make and share presentations in your post with Zoho Show
Adding a live presentation in your posts can be another great idea to provide valuable additional content to your readers. Zoho.com is a suite of online web applications geared towards increasing your productivity and offering easy collaboration. Zoho Show is the online presentation tool of this suite which provides for free one of the best environment to make presentation online I experienced. If you are a PowerPoint user you'll love it. The response is excellent, fast and simple to use. When your presentation is completed you can share it on your website embedding your file on your page. This is the result:



And this is the original post. About Zoho Show I can say it's a great tool. Some features have to be improved or added (group object, multiple object selection and alignment) but the impression after some hours of work it's very good.


Record and share your screencasts with Jing
Jing it's a free application for Windows and Mac which captures images and videos (with audio) from your desktop. Recording a screencast it's very simple: you can do it just with a click.When your screencast is completed you can upload it on Screencast.com (2Gb of storage space for free) or save it on your desktop and share it in your posts.