Academic Aesthetic Podcast 77

In today's podcast I discuss the pros and cons of BubbleShare.com.

Yes, I'm still wrapping up my experiences from last week's conference, but don't worry - today I'm only going to mention it a little.

It seems that every time I go to an event sponsored by the Discovery Educator Network they teach me how to use PhotoStory. Now PhotoStory IS a nifty program that lets you combine photos and audio to create slideshows, but since it's distributed freely by Microsoft, it's Windows only.

If you know anything about me, you know I'm a Mac guy. Rants on security and reliability aside, I can't run PhotoStory on my pre-Intel PowerBook. So you can understand that I would get a little annoyed when PhotoStory is shoved down my throat on a regular basis.

What's a MacAddict to do? Why, find a free alternative, of course!

BubbleShare.com has made a name for itself by allowing anyone to share photos and add tags to them. Sounds a lot like Flickr, doesn't it?

Well, the similarities end there. BubbleShare only stores smaller versions of your pictures, and even then only for a year - although you can renew at the end of that year for free. That being said, I couldn't find anything about hitting a size quota - something that definitely gives BubbleShare a one up on Flickr.

BubbleShare's key feature is the slide show. It uses a flash based system to run through the photos in a particular album, as you might expect, but there's more to it than just that.

It lets you record audio. That's right, just like PhotoStory, but through a web based interface. Office 2.0, eat your heart out. The down side to this is that since it's over the internet you might get that stutter commonly attributed to VOIP (Voice over IP, or internet phone calls) conversations. When I was working on my sample album for this podcast I had to rerecord more t han one segment because of that.

Once your album's set up the way you like it, you have a variety of ways to share it. You can email it to people, embed it in your blog or other website of choice, or change your album setting to "public" (the default is private, making it kid safe) and allow it to be added to their searchable database.