Tuesday 4 May 2010

Give your talks and lectures a worldwide audience

I have recently become a convert to the idea of putting as many as possible of my talks, posters and lectures on the web (see current progress here).

On March 25th I gave a talk on Cinfony to about 30 people at the ACS National Meeting. As soon as I got back, I put the talk up on Slideshare and inserted it in my blog. There have been 451 views in the month and a half since.

Because of this, now I'm going back and digging up all of my talks and posters and putting them up both on Slideshare and on my website. Naturally, I'm going to include the original file (typically a Powerpoint file) as one day Slideshare will be no more.

The funny thing is that although few scientists tend to provide their talks (notable exceptions are Rajarshi and Jean-Claude Bradley), I find it hard to think of any disadvantage. The whole point of giving talks and presentations is to publicise your work and surely your website is equally important in this regard. Indeed, many people might prefer to click through a presentation that explains your paper in bullet points rather than wade through your scintillating prose.

Another good question to ask is whether there's any difference between the audience that might have seen the talk at the conference and those that would have seen it online? The conference audience (especially at the ACS) would be more of the PI variety than the postgrad/postdoc. And I would guess that it would be the other way around online.

If you have any thoughts on whether this is a good/bad idea or know anyone else that provides all their talks, please leave a comment below...

4 comments:

Jan Jensen said...

I think that's a wonderful idea. I agree with you, I can't see any real downside. It's hereby on my to-do list (how's that for scintillating prose?).

Thanks very much for the nice mention of the book and blog on on Quantum Chemistry I and III, respectively.

Sepp said...

Great idea, I need to dig out some of the old stuff, publicizing shouldn't hurt :)

ChemSpiderman said...

I've been posting to Slideshare for a couple of years and some of my talks have over 2200 views. Clearly they are more discoverable on SLideShare where I am sure they do their best to optimize indexing: http://www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams/presentations?order=popular. I have just started adding posters recently (single page PPTs) and also papers.

Markus Sitzmann said...

I started it after the ACS San Francisco Meeting (http://cactus.nci.nih.gov/blog/?p=627), too - and yes, I think it is a great idea. The only disadvantage I can see is that the reuse of slides and talks get more trackable :-), but my plan is to dig out old stuff.