Five for Friday - July 21, 2011

Every week it seems like I read about 47,000 blog posts, articles, press releases etc. all in my continued quest to provide you, loyal readers, with ideas and insights to help, inform, or amuse you. But each week also, I am lucky if I can draw on at most 4 or 5 of these pieces that might eventually become the basis for posts, the rest slip off into the ether.  Sure, I share some of the links on Twitter and Facebook, but we all know how fleeting those media can be.

So today I thought I'd do a classic 'Links to 5 articles I thought were interesting this week' take, so that at least I could find a way to share and promote some of the great stuff I read. But then I thought about it for a minute more and realized the 'Here are 5 links' posts are pretty weak, a little tired, and sort of a blogger's way of raising the white flag of 'I have no more good ideas this week. I surrender.'

But then while I was debating this, (the mental debate was at least 43 seconds), I remembered a neat little presentation-type tool I read about this week that might make my little '5 links' post just a bit more interesting.  Below is the embed of the tool and the links, more details on what it is and how you can try it out after the jump). Email and RSS subscribers may need to click through and there is a little arrow on the upper right corner of the slideshow to use for navigation.

Steve's Top 5 (or really 7) Reads of the week:

Pretty cool right? 

The tool is from a web service called Slidestaxx, and it allows the user to create embeddable and shareable slideshows from multimedia and social web content. Sign up for a free account, and in minutes you are creating a cool slideshow that can consist of online images, video, website links, and more. Add a short little description to each slide, (about the length of a Tweet), and publish.  You can then share your slideshow on social media, share a direct URL link, and grab the embed code to use on your site.

All told, I think it is a nice improvement from the list of hyperlinks.

Give Slidestaxx a try and let me know what you think.  And check out the 5, (really 7), links in my Slidetaxx presentation above.

Have a great weekend!