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
Update: Simon and Ryan from Omnisio posted below that they show the links back to SlideShare on both the player and on the Omnisio video page. Thanks!

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

The Plaxo team just released an update to their site. You can now show off your slideshows from SlideShare on your Plaxo feed, which is a great way to let your friends and colleagues know about new slideshows that you have created.

Here’s a slideshow that shows how to do it.

| View | Upload your own

Extra-geeky footnote: like many other integrations with our site, the Plaxo integration was done using our RSS feeds: no API authentication or complications required! RSS is a surprisingly powerful interface for making mashups like this, since we load up our rss feeds with all kinds of multimedia goodies (specifically thumbnails and embed codes for the slideshows in the feed).

For the last several hours, SlideShare has been experiencing an extremely heavy distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. What seems to be going on is that a large botnet is trying to take down our site. The attack was fully saturating the entire network connection at our hosting provider (several 10Gbps uplinks).

Right now the site is down. More updates as they become available.

Update (Apri 19th, 7 AM PST) : The site is back to normal now…

Update (Apr 19th, 2 PM PST): Several people are reporting problems, though others can reach site. Attack continues though it is weaker than before.

Update (Apr 19th, 3 PM PST): All clear now. Attack is no longer on. You should be able to reach SlideShare without problems. If you do have problems, please let us know and we will look at it.

Update (Apr 19th, 10 PM PST): The problem seems to be have resurfaced … the site is currently off air.

Update (Apr 20th, 4 AM PST): The problem seems to be under control at the present moment.. the attacks are continuing but have reduced in intensity.. slideshare is currently operational… stay tuned for updates…

Editing of uploaded slideshows has been temporarily withdrawn due to some technical problems we are facing. This shall be back to normal in a few days. Please bear with us till then.

21st April, 5:00 AM PST: The editing functionality has been restored now…

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!

4th April, PST 4:00 AM - We’ve had some problems with our conversion servers during the last 12 hours. As a result, file conversion times have gone up during this period.

The problem has been rectified by our engineers and the servers are back up & running. However it will still take a few hours before the backlog gets cleared. Please bear with us on this.

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.