It’s still in the early stages (.2 release), but this should make creating slideshare mashups and integrations much easier for Java developers. The code and documentation is available for download on code.google.com/p/jslideshare

Big thanks to Lucio Benfante for making this! It still doesn’t support all the SlideShare API methods yet, but it looks very promising.

Just wanted to let our users know that SlideShare is now also available at www.slideshare.com. Till now we have been on the .net URL. A full scale migration to .com will happen subsequently, but for the time being you can just type slideshare.com in your browser and press enter! We promise… you will reach your favorite website safely!

Off course, all the current .net URLs work as before… no change there.

The Plaxo team just released an update to their site. You can now show off your slideshows from SlideShare on your Plaxo feed, which is a great way to let your friends and colleagues know about new slideshows that you have created.

Here’s a slideshow that shows how to do it.

| View | Upload your own

Extra-geeky footnote: like many other integrations with our site, the Plaxo integration was done using our RSS feeds: no API authentication or complications required! RSS is a surprisingly powerful interface for making mashups like this, since we load up our rss feeds with all kinds of multimedia goodies (specifically thumbnails and embed codes for the slideshows in the feed).

For the last several hours, SlideShare has been experiencing an extremely heavy distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. What seems to be going on is that a large botnet is trying to take down our site. The attack was fully saturating the entire network connection at our hosting provider (several 10Gbps uplinks).

Right now the site is down. More updates as they become available.

Update (Apri 19th, 7 AM PST) : The site is back to normal now…

Update (Apr 19th, 2 PM PST): Several people are reporting problems, though others can reach site. Attack continues though it is weaker than before.

Update (Apr 19th, 3 PM PST): All clear now. Attack is no longer on. You should be able to reach SlideShare without problems. If you do have problems, please let us know and we will look at it.

Update (Apr 19th, 10 PM PST): The problem seems to be have resurfaced … the site is currently off air.

Update (Apr 20th, 4 AM PST): The problem seems to be under control at the present moment.. the attacks are continuing but have reduced in intensity.. slideshare is currently operational… stay tuned for updates…

4th April, PST 4:00 AM - We’ve had some problems with our conversion servers during the last 12 hours. As a result, file conversion times have gone up during this period.

The problem has been rectified by our engineers and the servers are back up & running. However it will still take a few hours before the backlog gets cleared. Please bear with us on this.

Edward Tufte, the renowned author, academic, and speaker best known for his pioneering work on the display of quantitative information, has joined the SlideShare board of advisors. Tufte is the author of “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” and several other books of about the same size and shape. He is also renowned for his groundbreaking essay on presentation design, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” ( summary available).

“SlideShare offers a unique platform to influence the world of presentation design” said Tufte in an interview at his tastefully appointed office at Cheshire, Connecticut this morning. “Thousands of people upload PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare every day. But no one is providing people with guidance as to how to improve their work. It’s often as simple as hitting the delete key!“.

Welcoming Tufte to the board, Jonathan Boutelle (CTO of SlideShare) noted that from today, presentations containing bullet points will not be supported by SlideShare. Special algorithms based on Tufte’s groundbreaking work will parse the PowerPoint file and remove all bullet points, deceptive “chart junk”, and other elements that distract from a presentations effectiveness.

“By implementing algorithms that leverage Tufte’s unique approach to PowerPoint design, we’ll make all of the presentations on SlideShare more compelling and influential than ever!” said Boutelle. “And a unique side effect is that the algorithm compresses the resulting files better than any previous technique we’ve ever tried. Not only does this conserve bandwidth, but (what’s left) of the presentation should download in record time!”

SlideShare will be down for scheduled maintenance starting 9:30 pm PST on Sunday, 30th March. This is likely to last an hour & half at the maximum. Please bear with us.

Update PST 23:00 PM: The maintenance work has been completed… the site is back up & running.

Our hosting provider (ServePath) has been having intermittently problems for past few days and right now site is totally down. Sorry about this. Our hosting provider is generally been very reliable, and we are hoping they will be able to solve the problem very soon.

Update 4 PM PST: We are in touch with ServePath, but they don’t have any information on when site will be back up. Their blog says they are working on it, but it does not say when it might be back up.

Update 11 PM PST: Slideshare is back up now… all systems working, under control… the servers are firing on all cylinders.. it’s been a tough time… hopefully this will help us prepare for avoiding anything like this in future.