Our cluster network is undergoing maintenance. As a result SlideShare will be down. We expect it to be back in maximum 1 hour. Follow twitter.com/slideshare for latest updates.

UPDATE (0215 CST): We’re back up. Fully loaded.

The SlideShare community responded with lot of care and empathy, in the wake of the recent unfortunate events that ensued in Haiti. Many a presentations from our users, have tried to capture the plight of the Haitians, and make the people of the world aware of the goings on.

Prayers, support and condolences have poured in from our readers. Many of them provide a lot of useful information, so that help can reach the needy unabated.

We at SlideShare share the feelings of our community and too join in support, in praying for victims and their family. We make an appeal to all, to help in any which way they can.

The Holiday Spirit Contest 2009 saw a month long run and a lot of spirited participation. It was different from the usual contests in a way that there were no judges and we left it to the users to determine the winners.

The winners are:

1st Prize:
‘Calling For The Real Santa’ by abhishekshah

2nd Prize:
‘Happy Holiday’ by vili48

3rd Prize:
‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ by doina

Congratulations to all the prize winners! A big thanx to all the people who participated in the contest.

P.S: We received a few complaints about vote rigging; we have taken every possible step to ensure that the final vote-counts were fair and based on legitimate votes.

Sunday 11:45 PM PST: We are doing some important scheduled maintenance on our servers. The site is likely to be down for about an hour. Please bear with this.

Monday 00:45 AM PST: Server maintenance done and over. All systems back to normal … let us know if you are facing some problems.

The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is now live. Check out the presentation below for a quick walk through the ruling presentation trends in 2009. The zeitgeist includes some data points about presentations, presentationware, presenters, usage trends etc that would be of interest to just about everyone. We have also sprinkled it with some fun facts & trivia. Our engineering team spent considerable time mining our database so as to come up with these numbers.

The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is being published for open and unrestrained usage. Feel free to quote these figures in your works, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes (we’d appreciate an attribution though).

The Zeitgeist also included community voting for the most inspiring presenters on SlideShare. This activity was ongoing for the last three weeks. The following SlideShare users have been nominated at the top of the charts. Congrats to them for achieving this feat (and also for inspiring the SlideShare community).

1. Christian Heilmann
2. John Resig
3. Dave McClure

Here’s wishing goodbye to 2009. And wishes for a smashing and successful 2010!

On behalf of the entire SlideShare team,

- Rashmi Sinha
Cofounder & CEO

SlideShare has been included in the coveted list of ‘100 Essential Websites‘ for 2009, compiled by guardian.co.uk . SlideShare finds a mention as one of the top websites under the ‘Create/Collaborate’ category.

We would like to take up this opportunity to thank the Guardian Team and our community for making this happen. Let the good times roll!

Wir freuen uns, bekannt geben, dass SlideShare XING-Anwendung ist jetzt in deutscher

Oops… We’re pleased to announce that SlideShare XING application is now available in German language too. This should come handy for our users from Germany!

If you are a XING.com user, just set your language preference to German by going to Home > Settings > My language preferences > Edit and choosing Deutsch.

That’s it. You can then access the complete SlideShare application in German.

This is one of the first steps taken by SlideShare towards internationalization. We plan to make many more such releases in the near future.

(P.S. Our English speaking users can continue using the application in English, like before)

Ho Ho Ho! Holidays are upon us. We at SlideShare thought it would be sort of cool to let our hair down, and do something fun! So we conjured up – The Holiday Spirit Contest 2009!

Celebrate anything and everything that revolves around these festive times and capture them onto presentations. What constitutes the ‘Spirit’ is entirely up to you. You can begin presentation uploads starting November 27^th 2009, 00:01 AM PST. The last day for uploads is January 2^nd 2010, 11:59 PM PST.

Drifting away from tradition, there won’t be any judges this time around. You judge. Vote up. Or down. (Yep, we brought that one back! ). Voting ends on January 5^th 2010 11:59 PM PST.

There are no limits to the number of presentation uploads either. You can put up as many entries as you want.

And as contests and celebrations go, there are prizes! Amazon Gift certificates worth $500 to be won for the winning entries. The winners will be declared on January 6^th 2010.

Check out this slide deck for a quick walkthrough.

Get started and help us get the word out! Blog it, Tweet it & Facebook it – Over a month long holiday celebrations are happening, and it’s happening here on SlideShare!

Best of luck with your entries and may the most ‘spirited’ one win!