Embed SlideShare

Community members offer great tips

We really appreciate it when members of the SlideShare community take it upon themselves to write helpful how-to articles, curate collections of their favorite presentations, and give shout-outs to apps we’ve created. This week has been particularly fruitful, starting with Kristina Allen’s guest post entitled “Top 5 SlideShare Marketing Tips,” published on Jay Baer’s blog, ‘Convince & Connect’.
Kristina says, “I really love creating short (read: easily consumable) but informative Slideshares and then socializing them with my networks.” Kristina describes how she uses visual metaphors in her slideshows, the importance of including a call-to-action, and other helpful tips. A special thanks to Jay Baer for publishing this article.

Our LinkedIn application has been available for a while now, but we appreciate this new article by Liane Cassavoy of PCWorld detailing its value for active job seekers. Aptly titled “SlideShare Presentations for LinkedIn Adds Interest to Job Networking,” the article details how to access your SlideShare account from your LinkedIn profile. You can also embed links, share a presentation via email, and manage whether others can download your presentations.

If there’s one thing we can’t get enough of, it’s collections of favorite slideshows from SlideShare users. In his article “10 Awesome SlideShares of Social Media Marketing,” Koka Sexton says, “I appreciate all of the knowledge that is given away on Slideshare and here are a few of my favorite presentations of ways to use social media.” You’ll see a few of our fave social media presentations and some new ones, too. Thanks Koka, for putting this list together!

It’s here! Our shiny new Javascript API

Attention developers…you asked for it, and here it is. Our new JavaScript API allows users to access major functions, navigate across presentations, and control the Slideshare embed player via JavaScript. For your embedded presentations, you can now make JS calls to do things like view next and previous slides, and jump to a certain slide.

Have you ever wanted to automate synchronized slides and video? Or automate several players to randomly play slides one at a time? Create your own mashup and let your imagination be your guide.

You’ll find details about requirements along with some sample code on our developers API page. We also created a very basic demo with sample code and examples of how to use the Slideshare API.

We look forward to hearing what you come up with. Please add your comments to the Developers group.

A year of innovation at SlideShare

Wow, what a year! As we look back at 2010, we are truly grateful for the support and growth of the SlideShare community. The quality of presentations has never been better, and the innovation of companies and individuals in our extended network has been awesome. Here are some of the highlights:

In response to feedback from many of you, our big launches included the ability to share professional videos. We’re especially excited to partner with the large social platforms and their communities. Twitter users now have the ability to embed and play presentations on right in the details pane. Twitter’s mission to increase multimedia content is a perfect fit for SlideShare presentations.

We enhanced our freemium model with the ability to upgrade to a Pro Account. Thanks to our friends at IBM, we created the first Pro Network. Sales leads can now be automatically imported into your SalesForce account with Slide2Lead. The branded channels have become immensely popular, and the LinkedIn features we added this year have received great feedback from SlideShare users!

Special recognition goes to members of the development community who created innovate ways to use the SlideShare API. Slide by Slide iPad app, developed by PaniPuri Soft, allows users to share their favorite slideshows with friends and colleagues through Facebook, Twitter, or email. Chris Heilmann, a developer-evangelist at Mozilla, developed a way to embed image-based SlideShare presentations without using Flash. Zentation.com built a cool tool to synchronize your presentations and videos. And on Blackboard, students and teachers can now use content from SlideShare within Blackboard’s learning management system. We hope you’ll take a look at the complete list of mashups using our API.

What’s in store for 2011? Let us know what you’d like to see! We are all about the SlideShare community of presenters, developers, planners and viewers. One thing is for sure, the momentum of 2010 is sure to increase in the coming year. We are on a roll!

New way to embed presentations while skipping the Flash

Great news for developers who want to embed SlideShare presentations without the use of Adobe Flash. Chris Heilmann, a developer-evangelist at Mozilla, has come up with a way to embed image-based SlideShare presentations, skipping Flash altogether. Heads up iPad and iPhone developers – this is what you’ve been waiting for!

Some time ago we launched a mobile site that displays content in an image-based format. This allows us to make slideshows available on devices that don’t support Flash. Chris has taken it a step further to create an online tool that embeds Slideshare presentations using only Javascript and CSS. Since this is an open source tool, you can customize it and include embeds that play nicely with your website, For example, the look and feel of the player controls, as well as the display can be changed e.g. 2 slides at a time. You can use the tool to generate an embed of an existing presentation, read his blog post about how he did it and get the source code to adapt to your own projects.

Try it out, let us know how it’s working for you, and post a link to your image-based presentation in the comments below.

Whitepapers on a Cloud!

ReadWriteWeb is making its Future of the Cloud report available for free through SlideShare’s LeadShare service. This is the fourth premium report produced by ReadWriteWeb and through the generosity of their partners Intel & VMware, this is the first one they have provided as no cost to you.

Check out RWW’s Cloud Channel for ongoing coverage of the strausphere.

Now embed your SlideShare docs on WordPress.com

Ever since we introduced the new player to display presentations (and documents) that were in portrait mode (taller than they were wide) people have asked us to enable that for embeds on WordPress.com.

We’ve been working with the folks at Automattic over the last couple of weeks to ensure the new player works there too. So now you can just copy the WordPress.com shortcode from a presentation page and paste it into your post. Once you save and publish, that will automatically (see what I did there?) be replaced by the correct player displaying your presentation or document from SlideShare.

Geeky stuff for plugin authors: The only change we’ve made is adding an extra “&type=d” to the end of the shortcode. When you see this, you should use the new ssplayerd.swf instead of the regular presentation player.

SlideShare presentations now in Tokbox!

The live video calling service Tokbox, added support for sharing and viewing SlideShare presentations last week.

This is an awesome feature in a really cool service and we’re excited about this novel way of sharing and discussing presentations.
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The long tail of SlideShare presentations

Ever heard of Chris Anderson’s long tail? Someone did the analysis and found that SlideShare presentations have a long tail. What this means in a nutshell is that “there is little chance to be a blockbuster on Slideshare, but that you can quite easily attract a significant audience.” Go here for the original post