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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One of our users (username- pollyalida) has created a terrific slidecast about slidecasting and how it is distinct and more user-friendly than screencasting. Polly appears to be a consultant/trainer for libraries and schools and this is her blog.

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Thanks Polly for this super tutorial… this is probably better than the one we ourselves created …

We just rolled out a much requested feature - a richer SlideShare profile. Now you can make your profile more detailed and include info about your workplace, your occupation, location etc. You also get to describe yourself using something that typifies Web 2.0 more than anything else- tags; just use 3-4 relevant tags that best describe you, your persona, interests, dislikes etc. The personal information is now structured in a way that allows for quicker reading, and there is also a profile completeness percentage indicator!

For organisations, agencies, institutions or companies using SlideShare, you can also (optionally) add contact details (e.g. address, phone); you can also choose whether or not, this information should be displayed.

Let us know your feedback about this…check out how the profile section now looks in the screenshot below (incidentally that’s Golak- our developer who built this feature).

The Wall: Another change is that the publicly posted messages on the profile page will now be called “Posts to the Wall” (earlier it was called “pings”); many of our users had indicated that they found the word ‘ping’ inappropriate, and hence we are happy to change for the better.

This blog just got a makeover. It was long overdue and Arun, who recently joined the SlideShare team as a web designer took this up as his first project. The new Wordpress theme is a result of his endeavours.

Let us know how you liked this. What other things could be added here (on the right sidebar) to add a punch?

We’ve added a bunch of improvements to our slideshow player….

Now you can directly jump to a particular slide by entering it’s number in the text box located in the player’s bottom panel…we’ve also added the related feed at the end of the slideshow

You can easily post the slideshow on different social networks, bookmarking sites etc from the embed player (using Gigya, the third party widget service we use)..or copy/paste our embed code for posting to your blog

It’s easier now to email the slideshow to your friends; the email forms shows up inside the player (rather than in a pop up); you can also import contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc

Want to join the team that is building SlideShare? We are recruiting ROR hackers & geeks to join our New Delhi based team.

Working at SlideShare can be a hugely rewarding experience. Building social software is a whole lot of fun: the technical challenges, the high-involvement nature of the work (how often can you show your friends & family what you did at work last week?), the fast changing internet landscape, and the constant feedback from users, make it a different ball-game than the usual technical work.

Benefits include:

- Experience with cutting edge open-source technology
- Working with a team of bright, enthusiastic people where you can focus on creating great technology that is used by millions of people every day
- Competitive Salary
- Generous Stock options

We are recruiting for the following positions:

Server side hackers

If you’re a open source junkie, and love hacking Linux systems, deep algorithmic work (search, recommendation engines, etc), SQL tuning and optimization, and modifying open-source code to your own twisted purposes, then you might be a good fit for a position with our server side team. Experience in scalability of large webapplications is an advantage.

Front End Developers

We’re looking for web-savvy hackers who know JavaScript and Flash and PHP, and can use them to full effect in creating amazing web applications. Prior experience in application development in a internet firm may be an advantage.

Technologies/Platforms

We work on ruby on rails, linux, freebasd, debian, Amazon S3, MySql etc. Candidates not having experience in ROR can apply- if you have worked earlier on PHP, Python, Perl etc, thats fine as well.

Send resumes to ‘amit AT slideshare DOT net’