This is what one user had to say after uploading for the first time to SlideShare:

What this exercise has taught me is the numbers of people that you can reach with the simple (and free) exercise of hosting the presentation online. 26 people came to our training day; … One week after posting the links to these slideshows, this is the result: The Kent Libraries modernisation programme slideshow has had 280 views, and the Imperial College refurbishment programme has had 194 views! Now considering that there were only 26 people in the room at the time, this shows the value of online networking. Many more people have been helped by the excellent ideas in these two slideshows… (read more)

If you have presentations or pdfs sitting in your hard drive, why not upload to SlideShare and get some views for them…

This is one of our most requested features for SlideCasting.

We are happy to announce that you can now host your slidecasting mp3 audio files on slideshare. You can also continue to host them on an external host (e.g. archive.org) as before. The choice is entirely yours.

Here’s a quick tutorial for how this will work.

For SlideCasting, there is

- No limits to audio file size that you can upload to SlideShare (or host externally).
- No bandwidth consumption limits.
- No limits to the nos of slidecasts you can create in your SlideShare account.
- No music uploads, this is for talks, podcasts, panels and discussions. If you want to synchronize with music, please host it yourself.
- Please upload audio files for which you have copyright. If we get any complaints about copyright, we will respond immediately. (Please read our terms of service):

Hope the community likes this feature. Let us know your feedback in the comments

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.

We’ve added some great new enhancements to our embedded player today. While you could earlier share and grab the embed code directly from the player, you still had to visit SlideShare to add a comment, to favorite or to download the presentation.

Not anymore! Now you can login to your SlideShare account directly from the player, post a comment, save the presentation to your favorites or download the presentation too. Check out the presentation below to see the features in action

As always, send us your feedback and let us know what you thought. As this is beta, you might encounter some bugs, please let us know about those too.

SlideShare has supported Keynote from Apple’s iWork suite for a while now.

Last week we added the ability to upload files created in Pages too. So now you no longer need to worry about converting your Pages to Microsoft Word’s format or PDF before you share them. Just upload to SlideShare!

We recently added the ability to upload PowerPoint 2007 files and today we’ve also added the ability to upload and share Word 2007 files (docx) from SlideShare.

With this, SlideShare is now probably the first site to support most major office file types including Keynote, Microsoft Office and OpenOffice!

Yes, you read that right! SlideShare now accepts PowerPoint 2007 files (pptx, ppsx and potx.) This is a feature that many of our users have been requesting and we’ve finally added it.

You don’t need to save as ppt or pdf any longer, upload your pptx files directly to SlideShare.

We have been testing it extensively over the last couple of weeks but there may still be some bugs or conversion issues, so please let us know via our feedback form: http://www.slideshare.net/feedback

The community response to the YouTube SlideShare embedding feature has been awesome. We’re glad that our users are liking this. Here’s something else to know…

VideoSlides in Second Navigation: To help you see the latest examples of YouTube videos inside SlideShare presentations, we have introduced a new navigation link called VideoSlides. Screeshot below. This will expose you to all the cool things the community is starting to do with with this.

Autoplay of the video: This is not supported at present, but we plan to add that in … stay tuned.

Many of the questions you have about this will be answered in the FAQs that we have put up on this page. The FAQ is reproduced below for the readers of this blog.

FAQs
———————-

Q: How many YouTube videos can be embedded inside a presentation? Is there a limit?
A: At present, you have a limit of 5 videos per presentation. As this feature stabilises, we will enhance this limit, or even remove it altogether (depending on user feedback).

Q: How can I insert the videos at the desired position? Isn’t it complicated?
A:Trust us, this is a breeze! Our software automatically detects how many slides your presentation contains and displays all possible positions in the dropdown selector. Something like - “Before Slide 1″, “After Slide 1″, “After Slide 2″, “After Slide 3″ etc. Just choose whatever position you want.

Q: You mention that the inserted YouTube video will show up in a separate slide inside the SlideShare player. Do I have to add a blank slide to the presentation file that I upload to SlideShare?
A: Not at all. The separate slide for the video is automatically inserted for you. You should upload your presentation file as it is.

Q: YouTube is great, but I use another video site? Can I embed other videos as well?
A: At present, we support only YouTube videos. We plan to extend this to other popular video sites. Let us know which ones you need and we’ll examine its feasibility.

Q: The YouTube video plays fine, but there is some latency if multiple videos are embedded in a presentation. Why is this so?
A: SlideShare is using YouTube’s APIs for the video embedding feature. We think embedding 1or 2 videos in the presentation should suffice for most use cases and should work absolutely smoothly. We have also tested with larger number of videos- this works as well, though you might get some loading latency or instability, specially if you click through the slides very quickly. Go at a gentle pace, we promise you- it will be fine. Rest assured, we shall improve this as time progresses.

Q: The limit of 5 videos per presentation- is there a restriction about where the videos can be inserted? Can I insert all 5 videos between two specific slides? Or do they need to be spaced out throughout?
A: You can insert the 5 videos WHEREVER you want to- they could all be bunched up together between two specific slides as well.

Check out this example. This slide deck has one presentation slide followed by 5 YouTube videos one after the other. Thus you could make this work like a multivideo player for YouTube if you wanted to (maybe interspersed with some text on slides in between).

Q: Will the embedded videos also show up in presentations embedded in blogs?
A: Absolutely.

Q: Your mention that embedding a YouTube video inside a SlideShare presentation is just like embedding a video inside a blogpost. How is that?
A: While building this feature, we tried to mimic the way people embed videos inside blogposts (since everyone knows how to do that). You first compose the blogpost, publish it and then add the embed code to the blogpost wherever you want the video to show up and update the post. Correct?

Similarly, just publish your presentation on SlideShare as you always do. Then add the video URL (using our simple interface) and the presentation gets updated with the video. You can add the video(s) anytime and also remove them whenever you want to. Your uploaded presentation is independent of the videos and will get updated with your latest actions in a jiffy.

Q: Can I add a video to a presentation that I uploaded to SlideShare one month ago? One year ago?
A: You can add the video to any SlideShare presentation irrespective of when it was uploaded to SlideShare.

Q: What player controls can I use? Will Youtube’s video controls be retained? Can I make the video full-screen when it plays?
A: Use the SlideShare player controls to advance slides as usual. When you get to a video slide, use the YouTube player controls to play or pause the video. Video full-screen works as usual.

Q: If there is more than one video in the presentation can I start playing all of them? Will it buffer multiple videos?
A: No, the player will allow you to play only one video at a time. If you advance past a video slide while paused, it will continue to buffer that video. If you start playing a second video, you will lose your position in the first!