Webapp Blow Up displays Flickr photos in a full-screen slideshow for closeup browsing. When you want to show off your vacation photos from this summer that you uploaded to Flickr, head over to Blow Up Your Flickr and enter your username. Blow Up will pull down your photos and display them full screen, with a hideaway thumbnail navigation. Web site owners, you can even download the Blow Up app and install it on your own site.

Marketing whiz Seth Godin is right when he says that the thank yous dished out at the beginnings of conferences, large meetings, and other confabs are usually inelegant, rushed, and ineffective, boring the listeners and not really crediting the helpers. His suggested fix is to take or grab pictures of those you want to thank, and put on a looping slideshow ten minutes before the gabbing starts:

Put each photo on its own slide, preferably with a well designed ID below it (it should be on a black box, with a nice sans serif font reversed out. Like you see on cable TV news) ... String one after the other. Build a dissolve transition between each one. Program it to put up a new slide every two seconds—don't go too slow!—and to loop the presentation.

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How-to blog Tech-Recipes does the ink-saving work of figuring out how to print slide presentations in a standard nine-slides-per-page format, which isn't as easy as one might think:

• Click the "Print" button
• Select "Individual Slides" from the left-hand menu
• Select "Layout" from the drop-down box in the center
• Change "Pages per Sheet" to 9 (or whatever number you'd prefer), then hit "Print," "PDF" or whatever suits your needs

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Google Presentations, the oft-neglected PowerPoint-like slide creator in the Google Docs suite, just received a few upgrades to its functionality and design tools. The most interesting is the ability to export Presentation files as PDFs—still not all the way to PowerPoint exporting yet, but it's an option that makes Presentations a file conversion tool for non-MS-Office-havers and a convenient option for both getting paper copies on the go and possibly cut-and-pasting single slides into PowerPoint. Presentations also received the ability to add pre-defined shapes, which should be a boon to the flowchart fans among us.

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Flash application Pviewr offers a simple interface for generating sleek-looking slideshows from your Flickr or Picasa accounts, or from Flickr keyword searches. While both photo sharing sites have built-in slideshow functions, Pviewr seems to move a bit quicker, and offers helpful download links and presentation options that set it apart and could make it a helpful demonstration tool. For online slideshows using custom uploaded pictures, check out Slidez.

Windows only: Free webapp Goldmail gives those not willing to shell out for a package like Soundslides a dead-simple interface for creating and hosting slideshows with audio narration. The free version of Goldmail takes in images (by upload or even screen grabs for your Uncle Bif and Aunt Marge types), and then simply asks the user to sort them and talk while clicking through slides, inserting the transition points automatically. The two drawbacks are the advertising thrown up at the end (the $9.95/month licence gets rid of that) and the platform dependence—there's no Mac client, and even Firefox-on-Windows users have to install the ClickOnce extension to let the .NET elements run. Goldmail is a free download that requires a sign-up at Goldmail's website and runs on Windows only.