We have rolled out a SlideShare Quick Tour, which is a slideshow summarizing SlideShare’s features and capabilities. Sometimes people (specially new users) may want a quick walk-thorough of all that you can do the website. The tour should come in handy in such cases.

This is where the tour is housed (it has a page of its own); feel free to embed it in websites & blogs.

| View | Upload your own

We’ve just rolled out three much requested features:

Increased File Size: You can now upload presentations upto 50MB in size! That’s right 50MB! Go ahead and upload all those huge presos you wanted to show the world.

View the Most Embedded presentations on SlideShare: You can now view presentations sorted by Most Embedded (on blogs & websites). You may view these presentations sorted by day, week, month or all time.

Post Yahoo Videos in your comments: We now support embedding of Yahoo Videos in the slideshow comments. This can be useful to augment your presentation on SlideShare with accompanying videos about the event. (We already support other popular video sites including Youtube, Google Videos, BlipTV, Metacafe, DailyMotion and Viddler)

Do let us know how you liked these features.

Just wanted to let our users know that FriendFeed now supports SlideShare. The thumbnails of the slideshows will show up in your FriedFeed as well. Cool!

We’ve had queries from some users regarding turning off related slideshows at the end of your embedded presentations. While our developers are working on an automated feature, we do have a quick temporary fix for the moment.

All you’ve got to do is locate the following lines in your embed code and add &rel=0 at the end of the URL; this needs to be done at two places in the embed code.

<param name="movie" value="http://static.slideshare. net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=somr-the-social-media&rel=0" />

and

<embed src="http://static.slideshare. net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=somr-the-social-media&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355">

The rest of the code remains the same. Please let us know in case you face problems with this.

We just rolled out a much requested feature - a richer SlideShare profile. Now you can make your profile more detailed and include info about your workplace, your occupation, location etc. You also get to describe yourself using something that typifies Web 2.0 more than anything else- tags; just use 3-4 relevant tags that best describe you, your persona, interests, dislikes etc. The personal information is now structured in a way that allows for quicker reading, and there is also a profile completeness percentage indicator!

For organisations, agencies, institutions or companies using SlideShare, you can also (optionally) add contact details (e.g. address, phone); you can also choose whether or not, this information should be displayed.

Let us know your feedback about this…check out how the profile section now looks in the screenshot below (incidentally that’s Golak- our developer who built this feature).

The Wall: Another change is that the publicly posted messages on the profile page will now be called “Posts to the Wall” (earlier it was called “pings”); many of our users had indicated that they found the word ‘ping’ inappropriate, and hence we are happy to change for the better.

This blog just got a makeover. It was long overdue and Arun, who recently joined the SlideShare team as a web designer took this up as his first project. The new Wordpress theme is a result of his endeavours.

Let us know how you liked this. What other things could be added here (on the right sidebar) to add a punch?

We’ve added a bunch of improvements to our slideshow player….

Now you can directly jump to a particular slide by entering it’s number in the text box located in the player’s bottom panel…we’ve also added the related feed at the end of the slideshow

You can easily post the slideshow on different social networks, bookmarking sites etc from the embed player (using Gigya, the third party widget service we use)..or copy/paste our embed code for posting to your blog

It’s easier now to email the slideshow to your friends; the email forms shows up inside the player (rather than in a pop up); you can also import contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc

For the last two months, we have been working to add a punch to our community section; finally its out on our servers, we’re happy to make the announcement now!

The slideshare community section is now on steroids; it encompasses groups, contests and events (which we have just launched). This expansion (& consolidation) makes the community more comprehensive/compelling than before; whats more, you can now control the privacy of your groups/events as well. Check out the screenshot for how the community landing page looks. Read on for the details:

Events: Now you can create your own events on slideshare…you can assign the event its category, mark its duration/date on the calendar, assign its geographical location, invite your friends to join it…other people can join the event and mark their status as “attending” or “watching“…isn’t that cool?. This is the landing page for all slideshare events..this is the calendar where you can browse upcoming events…You can post a slideshow to the event (both from the event page as well from the slideshow page); you can also add a quick comment as you post the slideshow….we think this will help in galvanising the conversation around the event.

Flickr images & videos : At the time of creating the event, you can specify whether you want images from Flickr (using the event tag) to automatically show up in your event (example here); also since many events record videos , you can also embed the videos (from popular sites like Youtube, Googlevideos, Metacafe, Viddler etc) into your event.. (video example here)

See screenshot for the event page below:

Groups: The group functionality has existed for a while, but it gets more muscle now. Groups are structurally like events, but without the duration, date, geographical location or the attending/watching distinction. You can also categorize the group while creating it.

For both groups & events, you can control its privacy; at the time of creating them, you can specify whether it is public or private; if it is private, whether it will be listed on our site or not listed at all. You can also decide how users can join a private group/event- i.e. can they request membership or they can only be invited?

For both groups & events, we have created a system of control through different user permissions & accounts. Every group/event can now have (besides its creator) one or more administrators or moderators who can be chosen by the creator. Users who join the group/event will be its members, and they in turn can be promoted to the role of administrator/moderator.

Do let us know what you thought of these new features…..