Here' s a little experiment -- using a tool called "Webslides" which allows me to make a type of slideshow consisting of series of links to web pages.
Webslides is linked to Diigo, the social bookmarking and tagging site, that is a competitor to the stalwart standard del.icio.us.
I tried Diigo before, but despite all the hype, there never was anything really interesting or great in it to make me switch from del.icio.us - it has more features, but is also much more heavyweight to use - and has a toolbar almost as awful as the second-generation bloated Yahoo-ified del.icio.us one. Could Webslides be the tool?
Road Test
Down below in this post is my first Webslide, which is made from the web sites I used for the "Exploring" slide of my "Start Teaching with Web 2.0 Tools" presentation, which I had tagged on delicious. It a short list of examples I would both show on screen, and leave for for the audience to explore on their own later.
You will notice there are some issues with sites you sign into. In my show two of the sites are on Ning, and one is private and it wants me to login, as it should.
But since Webslides pre-fetches the sites, an error message comes up during the slide before, even if I have already signed in and have the site open in another tab! (Which implies it does not read the cookie.)
TIP: Use only public sites.
So a limitation is that you should expect during a presentation to have to sign into sites to get your stuff and the during an unattended web show like this one, it won't work, as is both logical and proper. The workaround that obviously occurs to me is to do a screencast and link to it, but that is not that same as letting the user have control to navigate the site.
Death on Safari
I also had tremendous problems using it with Safari - it seems to get stuck on slide 3 which is a screen cast that loads a java applet. It never did really recover from that and oad slide 4 for Ning. It had problems with slide 9, as well, which is a custom themed Flickr site. And when it gets confused, it will sometimes show the wrong slides in the list.
Now, I was using the default timing to show each screen 10 seconds. I remember setting that somewhere but for the life of me can't find it again -- the interconnections between the List you create on Diigo and the Webslides interface for the creation of the embed code is confusing. (It has all the earmarks of something built elsewhere and slapped on the main application.)
On Internet Explorer 6 on XP, it crashed on the pre-fetch of the Java applet from the Screencast-O-Matic page completely, and wouldn't display after that - the slide menu disappeared, too, so I was unable to navigate at all and had to close it down.
I had some problems with Flash, too, though not always. It handled YouTube videos fine, as long as you remember to pause the show to let the videos play.
TIP: Use Firefox: avoid sites with Java, be careful with Flash.
The Verdict
Oh well. It needs some work. Right now, I'd say it is still a lot easier to paste a link to your tags in your regular presentation format and just go through them that way.
The Show
Here is a link widget, just click it for a full screen show.
And here is the full screen one which won't really fit here, but it might fit elsewhere if your screen space is big enough.