Everyday for the next week (Oct 9th - Oct 16th), we are giving away $25 each to 10 SlideShare Business users!

Its easy to win. Start a LeadShare or AdShare campaign. Post your SlideShare username along with hashtag #leadshare or #adshare to Twitter. For example, “I just started a #leadshare campaign. My slideshare username is mikesmith”

Everyday, we will do a random draw from the previous days’ qualifying tweets. Winners will be announced daily on this blog post. $25 credits will be added to your SlideShare account (the username that you name in your tweet).

(In order to qualify : You need to have at least one presentation / document in your SlideShare account. Additionally, you need to have setup a LeadShare or a AdShare campaign. You can win only once. $25 in credits will be added to your SlideShare Business account. You can be disqualified from this drawing if content in your account is spammy or otherwise inappropriate. All decisions all final.)
Winning users can credits for either LeadShare / AdShare or a mix of both.)

For some time, we have observed that many of you use SlideShare for your business, from a one-person consulting shop to small company to large corporation. Our site surveys confirm this, most of you use SlideShare for your business, in one way or the other.

Today, we are launching a new section of the site : SlideShare Business for all of you who SlideShare for your business.

Its 3 years of SlideShare! 3 years! Hard to believe. From an idea in Jon’s head, it has grown to a vibrant place where millions of people hang out. Last month, we reached a total of 20 million monthly visitors. We beat all sorts of records - the most visitors in a day, the most presentations & documents uploaded in a day, the most registrations.

The daily life of a startup is so hectic. There is always a new feature, a new bug, a new idea to implement. But we wanted to take this day to stop for a moment and thank all of you. We feel lucky to work on SlideShare, lucky that you come to visit, to upload your slides, to check out others.

We have an exciting year ahead of us. Lots of new things up our sleeve.

We are also interesting in hearing - what would like us to do? What new things would you like see on SlideShare?

Thousands of presentations are uploaded to SlideShare everyday. But some catch your eye from the moment they get uploaded. Tha’s the case with the winning presentation for this year. I saw Dan Roam’s Healthcare napkins shared on Twitter, the day it was uploaded, and watched as it spread virally. No surprise that it won the contest (full results here).

The second prize was won by Sheltering Wings by Sarah Cullem,

, the story of an orphanage in the small West African country of Burkina Faso. I confess, I had not even heard of this country before this presentation.

The third prize was won by Feels Bad on the Back by Mohamad Faried who volunteers at an Indonesian kidney foundation.

One special announcement this year: the Web 2.0 Expo New York has invited the winner of the World’s Best Presentation contest to speak at their upcoming conference. We are thrilled to announce this partnership and hope this helps bring the value of great presentations to a business audience.

This year’s contest was sponsored by Adobe Acrobat 9. We want to thank them for their support. The contest also included a prize for best Acrobat 9 presentation. This prize was won by Avalok’s Creative Acrobatics from Avalok Sastri. The runner up for Acrobat presentations is Success Consulting Portfolio.

We also had several category prizes for Technology, Business, Creative/Offbeat, Education and About Me. The five category prizes were won by

24 Reasons why Twitter Sucks! in Technology,

Eco-nomics, The hidden costs of consumption in Business in Business,

Simplicity in Creative/Offbeat

A crime so monstrous in Education

Who is this guy in About Me.

Thanks for everyone who participated. We wish we could send you all prizes. You made visiting SlideShare fun and interesting. We will be back next year!

Update: ReadWriteWeb just posted an article about the contest results here.

There has been a lot going on at SlideShare recently.

Portrait version of SlideShare Playlist: We introduced the SlideShare playlist a few weeks ago . But it was limited to landscape mode. Today, we added support for the portrait version of the playlist. Many of you with blogs/websites with less wide columns will find this useful. Check it out below

| Get your SlideShare Playlist

New Helpdesk: Our customer support channels were not keeping pace with the growth of SlideShare. We are in the process of shifting to a new customer support helpdesk called Zendesk which should help us communicate better with you. Zendesk is a well designed customer support portal and integrates forums & FAQs into customer support in a seamless way. The migration will be complete in a week or so.

The best part about Zendesk is the concept of “Known Issues” where we will post any problems we are already aware of. Please check that before posting problems. You might find answer to your problem. And please be patient with us during this transition. We think that we will be able to be much more effective in solving problems now that we have this system in place.

New FAQs: We are also shifting our FAQs to Zendesk. Check it out here.

New Privacy Policy: Finally, we have done a long overdue update to our privacy policy. It has a lot more details about how we can use your data including sections about related issues such as security and phishing. These questions had come up earlier and users had pointed out that our Privacy Policy (which we had written right before we launched!) was not comprehensive. We care about your privacy and with this updated policy have covered any issues that you might be concerned about. Check it out here.

We know you are waiting for the results and wanted let you know that we are still waiting to hear back from a few more judges. Results will be announced on Tuesday the 29th. Thanks for your patience!

This is a bi monthly guest post from Scott Schwertly of Ethos 3. He will be regularly blogging on the SlideShare site. Welcome Scott!

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Most of us have had the privilege this summer to meet the most Inglorious of all Bastards, Lt. Aldo Raine. He is the hillbilly straight from the mountains of Tennessee who finds a way to bring justice back into an unjust world. In theory, the world of presentations is experiencing the same injustice – a needless death of presentations. Let’s take a few quotation cues from Lt. Adlo Raine and his Inglorious Bastards:

1. “We got a German here who wants to die for his country! Oblige him!”

Let’s face it! Some people just don’t get it when it comes to reviving the way presentations are done. They don’t like innovation. They don’t like new ideas. They don’t like change. At the end of the day, you can only do much to convince the skeptics. You can show them the way, but if they refuse to change then let them go.

2. “I’m gonna give you a little somethin’ you can’t take off.”

The whole goal of any presentation is to make it memorable. Simplify your message. Choose the right visuals. Tell a story. Pull at the heart-strings. Better yet, get a conversation started on Twitter about your presentation. Make it memorable. If it is not, then you have failed. Do something your audience will never forget.

3. “You know somethin’, Utivich? I think this might just be my masterpiece.”

The only way you will every a true presentation masterpiece is to build, design, and deliver your presentation the right way. If you build your presentation correctly, but design it incorrectly – what’s the point? If you design your presentation correctly, but delivery it incorrectly – what’s the point? If you deliver your presentation correctly, but you build it incorrectly – what’s the point? Well, you get the point. Masterpieces take time. They take patience. They take due diligence.

4. “You see, we’re in the business of killin’ Nazis, and boy, business is boomin’.”

The good news is that despite all the work that needs to be done regarding presentations, 2009 is shaping up to be the year of the presentation. There are so many great things happening in the industry right now – less bullet points, more images, better storytelling – it’s boomin’.

5. “…I think you show great talent. And I pride myself on having an eye for that kind of talent. But your status as a Nazi killer is still amateur. We all come here to see if you wanna go pro.”

Let’s admit it. The world is full of presentation amateurs. It’s time to go pro. Think different. Design different. Be different.

About the Author: Scott Schwertly is an epic storyteller. Today, he owns and operates Ethos3 Communications (http://www.ethos3.com), a Nashville, TN-based presentation boutique providing professional presentation design and training for national and international clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to branded individuals like Guy Kawasaki.

He may live in Nashville, TN with his wife and three dogs, but he calls San Diego home – the place of his beloved San Diego Chargers. Scott has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harding University.

Business Week columnist Carmine Gallo writes about how to give a lousy presentation. Some of the techniques for lousy presentations include “creating distracting color combinations”, “using wild animations”.

Go here to read the whole article. Good read to remind yourself what not to do when giving presentations.