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.

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!

It’s likely you are aware of the Microsoft Parent ToolBox Channel currently running on SlideShare. What you might not be aware is the channel offering called ‘The Microsoft Office Real Life Tools Sweepstakes‘. For every comment on the blogposts, or any presentation or document added to the channel, you get one entry into the sweepstakes. The more you participate by commenting or uploading, the more chances you get to win a copy of Microsoft Office 2007!

Check out details about the sweeptakes here.

The Parent ToolBox Channel has been a new addition to the SlideShare community. It is quite useful since it bring you tons of practical tips and pragmatic advice from some of the world’s best parenting bloggers, who are sharing their insights through this channel. The channel is helping create an infinite pool of parenting wisdom.

If you haven’t participated as yet, make sure to do so now. This is a one of a kind effort and we would like all members of our community to benefit from this.

Carmine Gallo had a quick interview with our World’s Best Presentation Contest winner Dan Roam. Dan is amazingly insightful in his answers so we wanted to publish it for the SlideShare community. Enjoy!

Q: What was the purpose of explaining health care with stick figures and napkins?

A: Like many people, I became concerned about the direction the health care debate had taken in this country. The anger, anxiety, and frustration we saw at the town halls told me that we lacked a common understanding of the issues actually on the table; nobody had drawn the health care “big picture” to explain what anyone was talking about. The result is chaos. I decided to draw that picture, and to draw it as simply as possible in order to establish a clear baseline for deeper discussions. I learned long ago that when helping executives clarify their ideas, nothing is more powerful than a simple hand-drawn sketch. The less polished, the better; the more “human”, the better. When introducing a new idea, people react much better to a work-in-progress than a polished presentation.

Q: This is hugely different than the vast majority of business presentations and I’m sure you don’t recommend that everyone copy this template. However, what is the common principle that applies to anyone’s presentation?

A: On the contrary, I DO recommend that everyone copy this approach. If we really want our audience to engage and understand, we must create presentations that invite our audiences in. Simple, hand-drawn pictures draw people in. Preaching to our audience through bullet points or overwhelming them with mounds of undifferentiated data does not. The standard PowerPoint approach actually closes down discussion. If we really want to make our message stand out, we have to make it look human.
What is the key takeaway/learning from Back of the Napkin?

Three quarters of the neurons in our brain that process incoming sensory information are focused on vision. While most people in business think they can’t draw (they can) or that they’re “not visual” (they are), we can all get infinitely better at discovering, developing, and sharing new ideas by taking advantage of our innate “visual thinking” system: our eyes, our minds-eye, and our ability to draw simple shapes.

Q: Dan, your presentation looks like it’s created in PowerPoint. So, PowerPoint is not evil? Your thoughts?

A: For good or for bad, PowerPoint has become the standard tool for communication. Because of its ubiquity and the ease with which PowerPoint makes lazy thinking look “professional”, it’s easy to malign PowerPoint as evil. But PowerPoint is just a tool. It’s a hammer. We don’t blame the hammer if the building falls down; we blame the builder. The same applies here. As a simple framework for telling a linear story, PowerPoint is fine. We get in trouble when we let all the unnecessary polishing tools in the menus do the our thinking for us.

Q: Finally, all the winners are highly visual. Does this represent the new trend in PowerPoint design?

A: Using visuals isn’t just a trend in PowerPoint design; using pictures to think, work, and share is the dominant business communication trend of our time, period. Which makes sense: in a globalized business world where we likely don’t speak the same first language as our colleagues and where we face problems of such complexity that they defy words, pictures are the answer.

This is a quick reminder that the World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 is in its home stretch. The entries were submitted till 8th Sep, and the voting will continue till 15th Sep. So you have four more days to get votes for your presentations. This includes the weekend – ideal to spend a few hours on your computer emailing your friends, posting on Twitter, Facebook etc to get votes.

This has been a great contest so far. Here are the stats as on Saturday morning (12th).

# Entries 2997
# Votes 10847
# Participants 2495

Also want to mention that like previous contest, we are keeping a close look on any voting malpractises. Once the voting is over, we shall do a exhaustive check on voting patterns, any hints of rigging etc. Fraudulent votes & entries will be disqualified straightaway before the final shortlist is sent to the judges. We want this to be a clean & even contest, and we’ll ensure that.

Just a quick reminder- this is the last week for submission of contest entries in WBPC2009. Entries can be submitted till the 8th of Sep, while the voting will continue till 15th. We already have about 3000 entries. Let’s see how many get added in the remaining period.

If you want to participate, don’t wait for the last moment. Upload your entry now. One disadvantage for last minute entries – you are likely to get a shorter voting cycle.

We’d also like to share something that will take you down our previous contests. This is the link for the screenshot below. We have created a page from where you can browse all previous slideshare contests (and we’ve had quite a few- WBPC 2007, WBPC 2008, Credit Crisis Contest, Fuze Meeting Tell a Story Contest). All previous contests are linked from this page.

The ongoing World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 has category prizes as well. One of the categories is “About Me” and we noticed a bunch of interesting entries here. Some that tickled our editorial team are embedded below.

Something to note- each of these entries is interesting for a different reason…

1) This is a social media resume. If you are wondering, what that is supposed to mean, take a look..

2) This is a sequel to a presentation that won a nomination in the WBPC 2008 last year. The story continues here. If you want to see the first part to this, go here.

The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 is hotting up. Its been a couple of weeks since this went live and we have 1547 entries from 1021 participants and 3432 votes have been cast (as on 18th August 5:00 AM PST). Its great to see this kind of enthusiasm in the community.

Off course not all the entries are top notch (thats expected). But one entry that did catch our attention for its humorous overtone is embedded below. This is a take on what people should do to win the SlideShare contest. Thanks avalok for this cool slideshow. This had the slideshare team in splits as well…

Just a reminder- this year, besides the votes polled, we are also looking at the social media receptivity for each contest entry – no of tweets, shares etc. So you’ll need to keep the score ticking on that front as well.