The cool new tool... reviewed

A new tool is rather useless without some sense of it's current place in the Web 2.0 world. This post will hopefully give you some kind of insight into who is using VoiceThread, what they're doing with it, what people think of it, some of it's limitations (of which, honestly, I can't find many) and then an example of a VoiceThread in action. 

In terms of who has already found VoiceThread, the company seems to be very good. They have been featured in a few national newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times in Russia earlier this year. They won an annual Webware award in 2008 for one of the 100 best apps. Their category was video uploading/sharing/editing/animation.  The site has also received nothing but rave reviews from educational sites as well as business sites hoping to help their clients rev up presentations. I have to make a presentation in just a few days here, and I've hit upon the rather obvious idea to use VoiceThread to create my presentation and then just let it play itself when the time comes. I'm especially excited about this idea because VoiceThread can create so much more than a PowerPoint kind of slide reel. The site is capable of creating animations. Since it records every action that you take, you can choose to play back a series of actions in order while the thread is running underneath them as it had been. You can then watch a short movie almost of what you've done over that past however many minutes of interaction with the thread. This is going to make for a different, almost character driven presentation that will much more effectively hold my audience's attention. 

Steve Muth and Ben Papell said themselves, though, that VoiceThread is far more of a hands on tool than something you can just be told about. So in the next post is a link to my very own VoiceThread on Shakespeare... please feel free to comment on it, doodle, and record laughter and questions. That is, after all, the whole point. :-)