I don’t think so, but I am proven wrong by this post on the blog Experience Curves. Its a spontaneous account of the author’s reaction to the SlideShare presentation “Happiness as Your Business Model“. It is from Tara Hunt (SlideShare username “misrogue”, author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) and she has used the Maslows needs hierarchy to justify why companies should incorporate the human drive for fulfillment into their core business business model. It is a stunning presentation, I only wish Tara could add a voiceover to it and make it a slidecast. That would make it even more compelling to the audience on the web.

Experience Curve is not alone in raving about this deck; check out some of the comments on the site

“… This is fantastic! International Happiness Day is July 10, 2008…I’m including this presentation as part of our promo…..”

“….This is really beautiful. Congrats on the simplicity and brilliance wrapped into one….”

This is the deck

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We are psyched to bring to you The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008, SlideShare’s attempt to uncover the Global Presentation Superheroes for 2008. This is a sequel to last year’s contest, and it is bigger and better this time.

There are loads on prizes on offer: First prize- MacBook Air, Second prize- Amazon Kindle and Third prize- iPod Nano. There are six categories and each category winner gets an iPod Touch. Then there are honorable mentions, each of which gets a copy of the book, Presentation Zen. And all winners receive certificates from SlideShare. Check out the contest announcer preso below.

Here are the contest rules and the contest entries.

You can enter your presentation in the contest and people around the world will vote on it. Your presentation could be about anything you love or care for. It will have to be put under one of these categories -  Business, Education, Technology, Picture slideshows, Creative/Offbeat & About me. The top voted entries will be nominated to our panel of judges, who will decide the winners. And our judges are the who’s who of the presentation world.

Guy Kawasaki- who does not know him ??  VC, marketing superbrain, presentation guru, entrepreneur, author and most important for us, on the SlideShare advisory board.

Garr Renyolds- presentation design rockstar, author of the blog & book Presentation Zen, popular speaker and consultant.

Nancy Duarte- she runs Duarte Design, a global leader in business presentations and best known for having worked with Nobel Laureate & Former US Presidential candidate Al Gore to develop the presentation that became the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Bert Decker- head of Decker Communications, author and ace business presentation coach, he has been on NBC’s Today Show many times as their communications expert, often commenting on the Presidential debates.

The contest ends on July 31 and the results will be announced one week later.

Screenshot of the details page below

So what are you waiting for? Rush to enter your preso… this could win you a shining MacBook Air, apart from building up your presentation credentials.

And let us know how you liked the contest, specially its stunning black theme, that Arun (our designer) has labored so hard to create.

This is kind of funny! I chanced across this slide deck on slideshare today… and the front slide caught my attention; specially the attribution statement - “This Slideshow Originated as one of those Email Messages that “goes around.” Please Help us Locate the Original Image Source(s) so we can Provide Attribution.” Wow! Thats something all of us have experienced - the footloose, orphaned ppts that are emailed across every day in chain mails (aka “Send All in address book”). What if you uploaded some of those to slideshare, or you happened to borrow some ideas or pictures from the lot. How would you attribute its original creators…. lets think of ideas:

How about - “…slide deck is attributed to the community of mass-mail spammers of the world…may their soul rest in peace..” or “…attributed to the whosoever is the original creator…” or “… attributed to the wisdom of the crowds…..” (web2.0 style). Maybe the folks at Creative Commons could help us in this endeavor. Why- this might turn out to be a new attribution type to add to the ones that CC already has?

Please get your creative juices flowing and add your suggestions in the comments…. we’ll compile a list …

Check out these tweets…. need we say more?

Thanks Stan Mazo… using slideshare is environment friendly as well - you save bandwidth & storage costs that would otherwise get consumed with these large ppt files zipping around the internet’s pipes and choking precious bandwidth. Also, your email inbox will be a lot cleaner, you will get lesser email bounce-backs… the benefits are many.

We just rolled out a bunch of features and bug fixes…

Subscribe to follow-up comments: You can now subscribe to all followup comments for a particular slideshow. Just tick the “subscribe to followup comments” checkbox when you are posting your comment- all subsequent comments (starting from yours) will be mailed to you. This way you can track the conversation that is happening on a slideshow. And off course, you can unsubscribe from this anytime you wish to. (screeshots below)

No related slideshows in the player: Many of our users have asked for this feature. If you wish to exclude the related slideshows that show up at the end of the embedded player, just use the custom link (below the embed code on the slideshow page). The ajax light-box contains the code for the embed player without the related slideshows at the end. Just copy/paste that code and your concern will be addressed. (screeshots below)

Missing profile image bug fix: The profile image was not showing up for some users for the last couple of weeks; we have received many complaints about this. This annoying (& stubborn) bug has now been fixed. Users with missing profile photos (that uploaded successfully but did not show up on the profile page) will have to reupload the image again, though. Apologies for the trouble!

Jobs at SlideShare: We have updated the jobs/recruitment page. SlideShare is recruiting currently for our San Francisco office. In case this is of interest to you (or to someone whom you might know), please get back to us with your resume.

One of our Chinese users, Oliver Ding has uploaded this slideshow , which is a call for people to help out the victims of the tragic earthquake that rocked central China’s Wenchuan County on the 12th of May, leaving behind thousands of dead. We deeply mourn the tragedy and would request our users to do their little bit in this regard. Please head over to these two sites - PledgeBank & CnReviews.com to learn how you could help out in contributing.

We also request everyone to join the China EarthQuake Group that Oliver has created. We have featured his pledge as the Slideshow of the Day.

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We are compiling a bunch of suggestions (quick tips) about Slidecasting in order to smoothen the process of creating an audio file and synching it to the slide deck.

I have a question to our users who are creating slidecasts- if your audio is a recorded talk or commentary, how are you doing it? I mean, are you recording it on your computer using the windows voice recorder, or using audacity? If you are recording it live during the event, do you use a portable voice recorder (i.e. Olympus & Sony have these), or maybe a mobile phone, a camera, or some other instrument thereof. How much does it cost to procure such a recorder, where can you buy it… those kind of questions. Please let us know in the comments section for this post… we are going to compile this and put it on slideshare.

Any other tips, tricks, suggestions about slidecasting, recording audio, synching it etc are welcome.. we are all ears … we want to improve the slidecasting experience.

We have rolled out a SlideShare Quick Tour, which is a slideshow summarizing SlideShare’s features and capabilities. Sometimes people (specially new users) may want a quick walk-thorough of all that you can do the website. The tour should come in handy in such cases.

This is where the tour is housed (it has a page of its own); feel free to embed it in websites & blogs.

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