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The system enables the presenter to reach out to a much wideraudience in a cost-effective manner.

This edition of NetSpeak discusses developments in this area.

A web based seminar allows participants to view/interact from anywhere on the Net with her browser. Naturally, this enables the presenter to reach out to a much wider audience in a cost-effective manner.

Webcast and web conference are other terms closely used in this parlance. Though all these terms refer to presentations/talks transmitted over the Net, some subtle differences exist among them. They differ in terms of interactivity.

Webcasting is considered least interactive, while an e-seminar that enables presenter and the participants to closely interact/collaborate is called a web conference. And a Webinar comes in between — not very interactive but certainly not a one-way presentation.

A Webinar system, generally, includes facilities to host the seminar materials on its server, schedule the seminar and to invite the participants. Apart from helping the presenter deliver the talk with PowerPoint type slides via the Net, a Webinar system provides several collaboration/interaction tools (like chatting) too.

The system allows the presenter to float real-time polls/questions seeking response from the audience.

Owing to its immense potential in reaching out to a wider audience, the concept of Webinar is fast catching up with educational and business organisations.

Several free webinars on a variety of subjects — both live and recorded — are available on the Net.

For instance, the list of Webinar links hosted at ‘Searching Marketing Now’ (http://searchmarketingnow. com/webcasts) is a place of excellent beginning on this subject.

Here you will find links to recorded and upcoming seminars pertaining to search marketing.

If you are looking for some educational webcasts, take a look at the site UC Berkely Webcasts (http://webcast. berkeley.edu/courses.php) that hosts links to webcasts on a variety of subjects.

To counter the explosion of webinar resouces, special search engines aimed at finding relevant webinars are being developed.

One such service worth a mention is the search service Finervista ( http://www.finervista.com/ ).

In response to your query, it lists out the webinars (both recorded and forthcoming ones) related to your search term.

You may also try out webcast services such as Insight24 (http://www.insight 24.com/webcasts/) and FindWebevents (http://www. findwebevents.com/). If you wish to implement a webinar system with least cost, there are a few select alternatives.

The free open source software Webhuddle (tipped off to this author by Manoj Kumar, a friend of NetSpeak), is one such product worth a try.

Webhuddle enables you to upload your presentation slides and provides markup tools for highlighting them during the session. Once a seminar is scheduled, Webhuddle provides a seminar URL for the participants to join. Facilities to conduct live polls and to share desktop with other participants are some other features of Webhuddle.

Another advantage of webhuddle is the feature that lets you record a presentation completely.

Also, you can make the recorded presentation available to your clients for download.

To try out the facilities of this free web conference tool, you can use the hosted service available at webhuddle (https://www.webhuddle. com/). If you wish to get a feel of the Webhuddle system on your own set-up, just download/install it on your machine.

Reading the manual (http://nchc.dl.sourceforge. net/sourceforge/webhuddle/webhuddle.pdf) could be helpful in this regard.

Box.net is an on-line file storage service, discussed in the past.

Recently, Box.net has augmented its service by integrating it with other on-line services (like Scribd, Zoho and Wordpress). The advantage of this new feature is that you can do different tasks with your uploaded files using these services.

For instance, if the uploaded file is a document, you can edit it with Zoho. For more details: http://www.box.net/services.

In this regard you may also check out the new storage service Drop.io (http://drop.io/).

The advantage of this service is that it enables you to obtain a personalised and password protected URL (like http://drop.io/your-name) for accessing/managing uploaded files.

Also, you can remain anonymous as the service can be used without any registration.

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