9th June Midnight (1:00 AM): SlideShare is down right now for some schedule maintenance; this is likely to take a couple of hours… we are upgrading some of our servers; this should help us speed up the website… please bear with us.

If you care about presentations, design or how to be a better communicator, then come by the SlideShare office this Friday evening. Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame is visiting the Bay Area and I am excited that he will be visiting the SlideShare office and giving a talk there. He will talk about presentations, zen and his new book: Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. You are invited to come by for the talk (which will begin 5.30 PMish) or for drinks/snacks later. He will also be signing copies of his new Please make sure to RSVP by dropping a line in the comments below.

Address: 739 Bryant Street, San Francisco, CA.
Getting there: Its an easy walk from Caltrain, just about 4 blocks. Its a slightly longer walk to BART (Powell station), about 7 blocks. You can generally find street parking (look around a bit). There is also a paid parking lot (at Brannan & 5th)

In the meantime enjoy some of his recent slides on SlideShare.

UPDATE: Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design (they designed the Al Gore - Inconvenient Truth slideshow) will also be joining us.  She will introduce Garr and say a few words about presentation design.

28th May, 9:00 PM PST: We’d like to let our users know SlideShare is again experiencing DDOS attacks… the site is down right now as it has been for the last couple of hours… we’re trying to get it back-up online ASAP. This seems to be a continuation of similar problems we have faced in the last month or so… stay tuned..

28th May, 11:30 PM PST: The attack is under control and the site is back up….

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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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!

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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.

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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…