I always swore that if I blogged again I wouldn’t just link to the same things everyone else came across that day – or a few weeks before! So I’m going to have to try really hard here to convince myself that this post is anything more than a link for Google’s new Presentation tool. I’ve found a way though – don’t include the link. What do you mean you can’t find it!

Anyway what do I want to say about it? Well, in summary, it is just a slimmed down PowerPoint clone, and anyone who has used PP will have no trouble using it. after two minutes exploring though, I hit upon two key differences:

• on the downside, there is no place to make notes. This has a couple of implications  – first it makes the Presentation useless for casual browsing. For talks I give using PPoint, I usually try to include some notes as the slides themselves will rarely stand on their own. Also, when writing a presentation, I tend to use the notes section of the PowerPoint slide as a place to park ideas and when writing with others (often) to make notes for my fellow authors.
• on the upside though, when you publish the presentation, you can basically share it in real time then discuss with those you share via IM alongside the presentation. This seems a great feature (though I would need to consider some practicalities such as: are the IM transcripts saved (do they stay there forever?), do other viewers need to have google logins (probably), or have google chat installed (prob. not).

So in a way we are getting mixed messages here – they want us to view in a group, but don’t seem to be encouraging group authoring.  Anyway, I am glad I took a look – when the announcement went by earlier in the week I was more concerned with the fact that it didn’t herald the arrival/integration of JotSpot as the new google wiki.