Came across Fliptrack after reading Tech Crunch this morning when I woke up today. I’m going to try out SlideShare as well, seeing that I’ve been lazy and haven’t done it yet. When I do that I will write up a comparison of the 2 put together.

As with most web 2.0 tools that I’ve come across, and I’m sure the same for you, a free registration is needed. I recommend doing it before you start dabbling with it for the first time. The practice video that I put together to check out the GUI was lost after I did the registration. All is not though as I did like the GUI that they have put together. It’s very easy to use and follow along. The first screen allows you to pick the music that you want to use. There is a WIDE variety of music to choose from, including some tracks from some named bands that are out there, Bare Naked Ladies included. Photos could be added from your local drive, Flickr, Photobucket or MySpace. Once the photos were added, all that was needing to be done to the video was adding effects to the pictures (transitions, panning, zooming).

Overall, it was very easy to use and I would recommend using it as an alternative to Microsoft’s PhotoStory 3 if you didn’t have it readily available on all of your machines (PC based labs only of course). Again, I’m saying this after not having tried out SlideShare yet. My one worry for application in the education field is this, there is no filtering about what content is on there it seems. I will take a deeper look, but just on the first page of videos I see a video entitled “Alcoholic Fun”, which I would deem very inappropriate for our students. It’s one saving grace is you have the ability to make your videos private, so student work could remain that way.

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.

Update: Wanted to update everyone. Thanks to Barbara from fliptrack for stopping by and leaving this message in the comments section of this post. I wanted to put it up here for those that don’t follow the conversations that go along.

Hi!

Thanks for checking out Fliptrack! Sorry to hear you had a problem with your video rendering. We were still enabling some of these elements this morning, and this is now all fully functional.

I just wanted to drop you a note regarding filtering. We are filtering for content, though we do tend to a pg/pg-13 filter we will screen or remove particularly offensive material. We have had student projects go up in the past, both as public and private videos – the only thing we are really lacking for these is spell check!

Again, we’re glad you stopped by.

Thanks Barbara for clarifying this. As with the YouTube craze, I can see this being blocked immediately by  school districts based on content, etc. Which I hope doesn’t happen, as I did like the tool.