We are very happy to announce that now SlideShare’s presentations are being suggested by Zemanta (a blogging tool). If you are writing a blog post and have Zemanta plugin installed then you can get suggestions to embed highly relevant presentations from SlideShare via Zemanta. And here is their blog post.

What this means for SlideShare users?
      One more distribution channel for your presentations to reach out to your target audience. So whats stoping you, upload your presentation on SlideShare and let it be embedded by other bloggers.

What this means for bloggers?
      Enrich your blog post by embedding a semantically suggested SlideShare presentation using Zemanta.

Apture is a great service for both finding and sharing presentations, pictures, videos, documents etc. in context. We are happy to announce that you can now find SlideShare presentations via Apture. The Apture team made a great presentation describing how it works (see below). And here is their blog post about the partnership.

What this means for SlideShare users.

• For people with blogs who like to embed SlideShare presentations: Just install the Apture plugin on your blog and find and embed a SlideShare presentation on any topic you find (all without leaving your blog page).
• For people who upload their content to SlideShare: Tag your presentations (and add good descriptions) well so that they show up in relevant searches. They might get embedded into publications like this presentation on Nigeria got embedded into New York Times article on Exxon valdez.
• Finally, for those of you who like to browse SlideShare content, you will start finding it on a lot of blogs / newspapers through Apture.

Here’s the video as well

Hello developers! We just released version 2.0 of our API.  The new version 2.0 includes new methods for fetching user data:

• get_user_groups
• get_user_contacts
• get_user_tags

We’ve revised output to be more consistent and revised methods overall for reduced overlap in functionality. We’ve also implemented more reliable and higher quality search.

Version 1.0 of our API is still available, but we strongly advise developers to switch to the new version. All bug fixes and feature development will only take place on the newest version of the API. For more information we have a developers page that includes API kits. There is a new Ruby Wrapper Gem, but please note the API kits are not maintained by SlideShare. For support we have a google group.

While version 1.0 of the API is still available, we strongly encourage developers to adopt the new API. All bug fixes and additional feature development will take place solely in the most current version of the API.

Do you have multiple presentations on SlideShare? Do you want to showcase them on your own site. Maybe you would like a whole page devoted to presentations showing a sorted list of recent talks. Christian has something for you.

You can see an example of it on Christian’s presentations page. You can get the plugin by going here.

This is another usage of the SlideShare API. We are excited about how much usage the API is seeing nowadays. If you are interested in building tools with the SlideShare API, learn more here, or join the API Google group:

Thanks Christian!

We have rolled out a new API call which retrieves metadata for any slideshow on Slideshare. By passing the slideshow ID or the Slideshare URL, the API call can return slideshow details such as

- The slideshow ID, Title, Description, Embed Code, doc (passed to player), Total number of slides

- Slideshow Language, Complete URL of the slideshow, User ID of Slideshow owner, Login of slideshow owner

- Comma separated list of Related slideshow id’s, URL of the slideshow’s thumbnail and the slideshow’s tags.

For complete details and documentation, visit the Developers Documentation page

We are hopeful that this new call will make it easier for developers to write better applications using the Slideshare API. We would love to hear your feedback about this new API call and suggestions about any new addition you would like to see on the API front.

The slideshare developers group on google has been a hive of activity lately! Two really useful API kits were released only yesterday.

Raymon Camden released his coldfusion kit for the SlideShare API.. It’s important to note that this act was dependent not only on his ability and interest in write the API: his employer, BroadChoice, had to be cool with it well. So big thanks to them!

The same day, Prabhu released his Python kit for the SlideShare API. We run a little bit of Python at SlideShare, so we definitely appreciate this! Like many of the projects spawning from our community, pyslideshare is hosted on code.google.com, which provides a wiki, subversion hosting, and issue tracking for free.

Big thanks to Raymon, Prabhu, and all the other awesome developers building libraries and applications on top of SlideShare! More API kits seem to be on the way (including a Ruby API kit!): we’ll keep you posted as they get released.

It’s still in the early stages (.2 release), but this should make creating slideshare mashups and integrations much easier for Java developers. The code and documentation is available for download on code.google.com/p/jslideshare

Big thanks to Lucio Benfante for making this! It still doesn’t support all the SlideShare API methods yet, but it looks very promising.

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.