SlideShare users who want to mashup slides with video - now you can do that using Omnisio. They have created a cool tool to do such mashups. You can see an example below. Its very nicely done. They just launched today.

One note to the Omnisio founders: Omnisio should acknowledge where the slides / video are from. For example for this talk by Merlin Mann, I am pretty sure the slides came from SlideShare - that’s where Merlin himself uploaded it to: http://www.slideshare.net/merlinmann/inbox-zero-actionbased-email

The page for the Omnisio video-slide presentation shows the origins of the video (nicely done!). Similarly, it should show the origin of the slideshow as being from SlideShare. I think the player should also show where the original slideshow and video is from. Maybe at the end (I know real estate is precious on the player, but it should be easy enough to show it at the end).

SlideShare users, if you have feedback about video-slide integration by Omnisio, please post it here or at their blog. I am sure the founders will appreciate the feedback.

First of all, a HUGE thanks to the SlideShare community for making this day happen. It would have been impossible without the millions of users who visit SlideShare every day. As a tribute, we have put together a small collage (below) of just SOME of our most active users… though I can think of thousands & thousands of other users who we would have loved to include in the visual.

Now to the news! SlideShare has secured a Series A investment to the tune of 3 million USD from Venrock, one of the prominent venture capital companies in Silicon Valley. With this investment, David Siminoff, managing partner at Venrock has joined SlideShare’s board of directors. This rounding of funding includes smaller angel investments from some prominent technology stalwarts- Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, David McClure (of 500 Hats), Saul Klein (founding partner of The Accelerator Group & ex Skype VP), Hal Varian (Chief Economist at Google), Yee Lee (ex Slide.com), Ariel Poler (former Chairman of Stumble Upon).

This funding will help us grow Slideshare better and stronger- bigger & faster servers, more engineers & employees to manage the website, bizdev folks etc.

And what better way to announce this than Meet Henry, the intensely popular & hugely infectious presentation genre that has inspired some many of our users (big thank to Ethos3 for creating this). Press releases are just so boring… they put you to sleep… why not let the lovable Henry (actually Dave, in this case) spice up the announcement just a little bit!

| View | Upload your own

We have some good news to share! SlideShare was named one of the top learning tools for 2008. Its 14th in the list, above Flickr, YouTube, Twitter. I love all those sites, but have to admit, it makes me happy to see that people in the learning community find SlideShare so useful.

1. del.icio.us
2. Firefox
3. Google Reader
4. Skype
5. Google Search
6. Wordpress
7. PowerPoint
8. Gmail
9. Audacity, Blogger
11. Google Docs
12. Wikipedia
13. Moodle
14. Slideshare
15. flickr, iGoogle
17. Ning, Twitter, YouTube

This list was put together by The Center for Learning and Performance Technologies after a survey of learning professionals. You can find the complete list here here.

Just for the record, last year we were nominated in the 26th position; so that’s a sure improvement. Next year, lets hope to break into the top 10!

SlideShare is offline right now. If you want to know the backstory and learn what’s been going on for the past week, read this TechCrunch story. We want you to know that we care about the freedom of speech and do not arbitrarily take content down.

Thanks for all of you who have written in with your message of support. This is a tough time for us and we really appreciate knowing that you are with us. We should be back on air very soon. If you are missing SlideShare, add a note, comment here….

Thanks for using SlideShare!

For the past week or so, many of you have reported problems with conversion. Some of you have waited hours for your files to appear on SlideShare. Others have lost files after trying to update them. I wanted to offer my personal apologies for all these problems. We had already been running at capacity (and planning on adding servers), and then suddenly there was an upsurge in number of uploads per day. Due to this, there have been long queues and other erratic behaviors that many of you have noticed.

Every email we get about this, every blogpost / twitter has been weighing on my mind. And I know there are many more who have not spoken up, but are disappointed. I know you work hard on your presentations and we are sorry we have let you down in sharing it with the world.

Please bear with us while we solve this. And post a comment to this thread if there is anything you want to share with us (even if you just want to tell us you are frustrated!).

Thanks for using SlideShare!

For those of you who did not guess, Tufte did not join our advisory board. And he did not make the statements in the blog post yesterday. It was just an April Fool’s joke. We are posting this clarification at the request of Mr. Tufte. We meant no offense - we think your critique of PowerPoint has spurred a lot of creativity in presentation design. We love your books and have them all in the SlideShare office (ok, I have not yet bought Beautiful Evidence, but I will rectify that today).

No, there are no algorithms for removing bullet points - SlideShare is a place for you to express yourself. If people like your slideshows, then it becomes popular, gets favorited, tagged, passed around. We don’t filter your content - express yourself as you want to, bullet points and all.

This post by Bert Decker is the second in our newly launched Slide Tips series.
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Although this series is about design in PowerPoint support – don’t go to the PowerPoints first. Design is essential. But before design comes something else. Purpose.

Garr Reynolds is an expert on presentation design – his article last week, along with his blog Presentation Zen and book of the same name, prove it. In today’s post, I’ll leave design to the expert, and focus on creating what I call a Communications Experience for your audience, whether it’s one person or one thousand. To put it all in context, here’s how to prepare for a powerful presentation:

1. Create the message: one that is listener-based, focused and with action.
2. Develop the slides that best support the message – but don’t become the message.
3. Deliver it powerfully, remembering that YOU are the presentation.

1. Create the Message

Yes, you need a message first. Unfortunately, this is counterintuitive to many business people who create slides and support material first, then add the words. In 90% of the cases, business people go to their computers and hammer out the PowerPoints in text, words and bullets – with precious few visuals, unfortunately. Or worse, they begin pulling slides from old presentations, hoping it will all come together. Then they add notes and comments that they’ll say verbally – and deliver the presentation, with little relief from the flood of information. You cannot effectively create slides without a purpose. The message comes first.

Information vs. Influence
If your purpose is strictly to inform in a presentation, with many words, text and data, go no further. Write a book. Use those words and text. Create a training manual, white paper, or essay. (All of which can, and often, take the form of a 176 slide PowerPoint deck.) This is perfectly acceptable for information-laden (often technical, and highly detail oriented) presentations. But you will be creating basically a written document, one that can stand on its own, and does not necessarily need your delivery to make it a presentation.
Unfortunately, the great majority of business presentations (of which I’ve seen over 10,000 in the last 20 years) are basically written documents that inform, but don’t influence. They don’t inspire. They don’t generate action. And they certainly are not well designed.
Think of your next presentation as an opportunity to transform information to influence. Don’t give a status quo update to your leadership team on key metrics. Call them to elevate next quarter’s performance by allocating budget to your initiative. Why would you read information from an outline when you can answer a higher calling by making that information relevant to your listener, focused and action-oriented?
To prepare your message, begin with the end in mind. With what inspiration or action will people leave the room? Three elements are essential here – and are the Cornerstones of our Decker Grid™ methodology:

1. Point Of View: The “So what?” of your message. Think of this as the one think you want your listener to remember.
2. Action: What do you want your listener to do with the message?
3. Benefit: What’s in it for them? How will your listener benefit as a result of taking your action?

2. Develop the Slides

There’s nothing wrong with continuous slides in a presentation. There are fabulous presentations, in the form of what I refer to as a narrated slide show. Instead of text, the slides are rich with pictures, graphs, videos and other emotively moving images to view. One great example is Al Gore presenting his slide show of An Inconvenient Truth – very powerful visuals and impact. Or the many moving illustrated lectures similar to those presented at the annual TED conference. (To create these amazing visuals, be sure to reference the pros like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.)
There are two other categories that are narrated slide shows, and use the design elements mentioned above, but have no personal presentation.

• They are Webinars and conference calls in business, that have to have continuous slides and voice, and the Slidecasts in the Slideshare website, which have sound with a PowerPoint. Although the design principles are the same, text and words may have to augment.
• And then there is the pure slide show, such as we see in the Slideshare website. Here the design is everything, and all the elements above have to be even more dramatic.

3. Deliver the Message

For in-person presentations, adding one new design element to the basics above makes all the difference. It’s YOU! Your energy, enthusiasm and confidence go a long way to carrying the message. You and the message are one, and your PowerPoints are visual support to your message – it is NOT the message itself.
One of the best examples of creating the communication experience is Steve Jobs at MacWorld. He is not giving a narrated slide show, he is the show, and he is using brilliantly designed PowerPoint (Keynote in this case) support to emphasize, dramatize, and otherwise create memory hooks.
The reason so few presentations are communication experiences is that people have come to believe that the PowerPoints are the presentation. They miss the power in the gestalt of both person and visual making impact on a listener – and thus influencing an audience.

Use Black Slides (For in-person presentations ONLY)
The secret sauce in design of support for the Communication Experience is to use black slides in your PowerPoints. A black slide is literally a black, blank background slide. Not a logo, not a design, but a nothing – simply a black slide.
Using the Black Slide concept will do three things:

• Black slides will enable you to clear your screen when you have finished one point and are telling a story, amplifying, adding a postscript, etc.
• Black slides will enable you to cross in front of the projector when you want to move around, own your space, and not have to have the projector awkwardly showing some text on your body.
• But most of all, Black Slides will release you from PowerPoint prison, where you create your PowerPoints and they become your presentation. If you create your content first, and then decide what your support visuals are going to be, it’s a different ball game. And the payoff is enormous.

We coached a CEO of a major risk management company, who had used PowerPoints in the typical way. He embraced the Black Slide concept. He wanted to make his presentations a Communication Experience. So when he gave his next speech at his company kickoff meeting, when he hit the clicker and the screen went black, people were looking around, saying “what happened to the projector?” After a very few minutes they got used to it. They concentrated on the CEO, focused on his message, and bought into his vision. They also told him it was his best presentation ever.

Consider your purpose. Consider design. And then go beyond the basics.

We are starting a series of blog posts called Slide Tips - exclusive articles by the world’s leading presentation and communication experts. This post by Garr Reynolds is the first in that series.
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There are no panaceas leading to effective presentation visuals, and there are no quick fixes. But when it comes to creating more effective slides that complement the spoken words of a presenter, there is one graphic design principle that can make a huge difference if applied properly: the principle of empty space.

Emptiness or empty space (also called negative space or white space) is a key component of effective graphic design in general. Yet, as Alex White points out in The Elements of Graphic Design (Allworth Press), “the single most overlooked element in visual design is emptiness.” And this lack of attention to emptiness is one of the key causes of slides that are either ugly, ineffective, or both. Most people think of empty space—if they think of it at all—only as background, the canvas behind the text and graphic elements on a slide, the trapped space in between “the content.” Emptiness on a slide is not really something to concern ourselves with most people think. But empty space is not nothing, it is a powerful something. Empty space in your visuals can breath air into your key visual elements leading to greater clarity, understanding, and augmentation of your spoken word. When you start to view empty space as a positive element you are better able to avoid clutter by eliminating the non-essential.

Learning from the world around you

You can learn a lot about the idea of using fewer elements in a visual and using empty space to amplify your graphic by observing the visual design in the world around you. It’s everywhere. You can begin to improve your design mindfulness by reading books on graphic design as well as by the careful examination of the professional graphics around you right where you live. Graphic design is ubiquitous, especially in urban settings such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, etc. but you can also find examples all around you in smaller towns too. As you commute to work or during your evening walk, begin to pay attention to the designs you observe—store fronts, advertising, posters, signs of all types, print media, and on and on. Designs that make good use of empty space will have messages—with or without text—that are easy to understand. Your eye does not wander or get confused. We notice differences. Designs that make use of emptiness often have good contrast and a clear design priority. We are not usually aware of “the design” of it, but we get the message. And the message is what it’s all about.

The land of Zen simplicity and visual clutter

Some of the best graphic design treatments in the world are done right here in Japan. And some of the most chaotic and mad examples of graphic design and communication are also right here. If you have been to Japan you know exactly what I am talking about. In Japan we have a 2000 year-old culture steeped in aesthetic appreciation and tradition juxtaposed with modern, fast-paced city centers which give one the feeling of living inside a giant pinball machine. Yet the lessons are everywhere. Below is an example from inside two department stores in my home of Osaka, Japan. Product displays in a retail space may seem to have nothing to do with presentation design, however, the importance of emptiness and removal of the non-essential can reveal itself in unusual places.

Above: This was snapped while shopping in an electronics store. We were shopping for an energy-efficient stainless steel refrigerator that would fit harmoniously with our kitchen appliances. However, while the price was easy to find, it was often hard to locate even the most basic information such as the exact size or energy consumption, etc. And it was difficult to imagine how this would actually look in our kitchen with the sea of clutter pasted over the very product we wanted to see.

Above: Here is a dining table in a furniture store just down the street from the electronics store. They get it. We need to imagine how the piece will look (and feel) in our home. The specs and details are there in a small sign, easy to find without searching.

Above: Advertising posters on trains offer good lessons as well. This poster (about 70cm wide) is encouraging passengers to take a trip to Gold Coast, Australia. Some of the type is no bigger than 10 point; I had to stick my nose to the glass to even read all that detail. Yet most people who see the poster will never be close enough to read all that detail. Good poster design should (1) be noticed, (2) be understood, and (3) be remembered (and hopefully get the viewer to take action). Posters and presentation visuals are different, but slides too must be noticed (have an impact), be understood, and help audiences understand and remember your point (or story, etc.).

In defense of the designer, this poster is a classic example of design-by-committee; the actual designer probably became no more than a computer operator with the client saying “Add this!” “Don’t forget that!” “Where’s the &^*#@! koala bear?!” and so on. Sadly, this poster resembles some design-by-committee PowerPoint slides which I have seen all too often in Japan. Often the default is: When in doubt, add more. “Slide-by-committee” is responsible for a lot of really bad PowerPoint slides everywhere in the world.

Above left: A classic poster that is painfully similar to a lot of PowerPoint slides. The designers of the poster on the right showed restraint, leaving most of the space empty.

Above: A lot of billboards which feature rich full-bleed images and a bit of text remind me of some good presentation slides. The entire “canvas” is covered by the image but the use of space, lack of clutter, and a clear focal point makes the visual easy to notice and understand in an instant. This huge billboard is across the street from the Apple Store.

Above: Here in a SlideShare deck are several examples and before/after slides that use empty space. All the slides were used to complement the spoken word in live talks.

Slide Tips is a weekly series of articles by leading presentation and communication experts.
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