The deadline for submission of entries in the World’s Best Presentation Contest has been extended due to popular demand from the community. Instead of July 31st, you can now submit entries till the 7th of August. What’s more- the voting on the entries will continue for one more week (till 14th August) post last date for entry submission. This is to ensure that all entries get some time to gather votes.

Check out the top 10 decks in the contest at this stage… each one of them is a masterpiece. We are looking forward to more and more of these.

If you have not entered the contest, do that here. You could become a global presentation superhero!

Presentation Tennis, the collaborative presentation design event that is currently running on SlideShare is hotting up. It has entered the public phase when anybody can send it their entries to be considered for inclusion in the masterdeck.

Please join the Presentation Tennis group and play a part in crafting this awesome slide deck!

We have received a few complaints about bogus/spam voting in the World’s Best Presentation Contest. During the last couple of days our engineers took a detailed look at the server logs ti identify unusual voting patterns. We did find some suspicious voting behavior… after careful analysis, these votes have been removed. This is to uphold the fairness of the contest and to address the concerns of some of our users.

Just as a note, the number of votes removed is small compared to the overall votes cast. Hence its impact on the overall standings is unlikely to be big, though individual entries may have their numbers changed.

Let me take this opportunity to reiterate this:

- The judges for the contest are presentation gurus of global repute; they are also independent of SlideShare. Be rest assured that bogus voting is unlikely to help you get past their judgement.

- Some people have written to us asking for changes in the contest rules… this is not possible while the contest is running. We shall keep your feedback in mind while designing the rules for future contests.

- Given the enthusiasm of the community, we have decided to have contests on SlideShare regularly… not just yearly events. Stay tuned…

- Lastbut not least, SlideShare is currently also running Presentation Tennis, an innovative event in collaborative presentation design… please participate in it. This is the first time an event of this nature is being organised anywhere in the world, so make the best of it. Join the group now to get started.

We wanted to share some info and updates about the World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008.

Blog Badges: To help you promote your contest entries, check out these “Vote for me” badges that you can put on your blog/website. Copy its embed code from below the voting widget and embed in your blog. Clicking these badges will take viewers directly to your entry to vote on. Examples below….

World’s Best Presentation Contest

World’s Best Presentation Contest

Max 10 entries allowed: As per contest rules, only ten entries are allowed per user. Once you have reached this number, you will not be able to enter more contest slideshows.

Private slideshows not allowed: For a presentation to be eligible for the contest, it has to be uploaded publicly to SlideShare. Private ones are not allowed.

Copyright/Ownership of content: Please make sure you are only submitting material that you own the copyright for. Learn more about our copyright policy here.

Bogus entries/spurious votes: We have implemented a fairly comprehensive system to detect bogus entries, spurious votes, orchestrated up-voting or down-voting etc, and are going to keep a vigil. If so required, appropriate action will be taken to preserve the impartiality of the contest.

We seek your co-operation in making the World’s Best Presentation Contest an even bigger success than last year.

SlideShare is experiencing some problems in file uploads right now. Some uploads are going through while some are failing. We are working on this right now to weed out the underlying cause . Please bear with us till then.

Update Sunday 9:00 PM PST- The problem has been rectified now… uploads should be working fine

While creating SlideCasts, we recommend the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) to host your mp3 audio files.

Here’s why - It’s free, gives you unrestricted bandwidth, supports Creative Commons licenses and readily gives a slidecasting friendly mp3 URL. Lots of users have been using the archives for uploading their audio file, so we decided to create a quick tutorial for how to upload an audio file and get a public mp3 URL for it. Check it out below:

| View | Upload your own

Last Thursday, SlideShare hosted the SF JavaScript Meetup. We packed the place full of JavaScript engineers, ate beer and drank pizza, and seriously geeked out on JavaScript. Here’s some snapshots of the event.

| View | Upload your own

My personal favorite presentation of the evening was from Peter Sowden of Meebo, who talked about the various client-side storage options available to web developers. I also gave my JavaScript and Flash talk Ignite-style (20 seconds per slide) which was silly but fun.

9th June Midnight (1:00 AM): SlideShare is down right now for some schedule maintenance; this is likely to take a couple of hours… we are upgrading some of our servers; this should help us speed up the website… please bear with us.