There’s a new way to author powerpoint! It’s called 280Slides, and it launched today.

280Slides is a web application, but it really feels much more like a desktop application. It’s free to use, and has a bunch of very “webby” features (you can grab photos from flickr and videos from youtube and put them into your presentation easily, for example).

Our favorite feature is that 280Slides makes it really easy to publish your slides on SlideShare! Once you’ve finished your presentation and are ready to share it with the world, simply punch in your slideshare userid and password. They’ll handle the uploading for you, and your slides will appear on your SlideShare account within minutes.

Here is a slide deck explaining this….

| View | Upload your own

Techy note: this feature was built using our web API, which meant that 280Slides didn’t really have to coordinate very closely with us to build this feature. They read the documentation, send us an email to check that it was OK for them to build this feature, and started hacking!

The slideshare developers group on google has been a hive of activity lately! Two really useful API kits were released only yesterday.

Raymon Camden released his coldfusion kit for the SlideShare API.. It’s important to note that this act was dependent not only on his ability and interest in write the API: his employer, BroadChoice, had to be cool with it well. So big thanks to them!

The same day, Prabhu released his Python kit for the SlideShare API. We run a little bit of Python at SlideShare, so we definitely appreciate this! Like many of the projects spawning from our community, pyslideshare is hosted on code.google.com, which provides a wiki, subversion hosting, and issue tracking for free.

Big thanks to Raymon, Prabhu, and all the other awesome developers building libraries and applications on top of SlideShare! More API kits seem to be on the way (including a Ruby API kit!): we’ll keep you posted as they get released.

28th May, 9:00 PM PST: We’d like to let our users know SlideShare is again experiencing DDOS attacks… the site is down right now as it has been for the last couple of hours… we’re trying to get it back-up online ASAP. This seems to be a continuation of similar problems we have faced in the last month or so… stay tuned..

28th May, 11:30 PM PST: The attack is under control and the site is back up….

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.