Update : Along with account types, we have also introduced an “Industry/Cause” indicator in your profile information. You can specify which industry you are working in. For the new account types, this is a compulsory field. For the default/normal type, this is optional.

Ever wondered this? Who are you on SlideShare?

Well till recently, we gave everyone the same kind of account (i.e. the default/normal account). So if you were a teacher, a university, a company or a lone user, you had to use the same account type (and have to specify your gender & DOB as well!) Not any more. We have released 7 new types of accounts. This was preceded by an exhaustive research exercise to understand our community. And the research indicated that these seven types of accounts (along with the default/standard one that has always existed) should cover the main sub-sections of SlideShare users.

Account types are free, off course. If you want to change your account type, just log into your SlideShare account, change your account types, fill out the options and you are all set to show the world WHO YOU ARE.

Why are we doing this? SlideShare has grown into a vibrant community and (behind the scenes) we are building custom features for different accounts. As and when these features are launched, we want you to best positioned to leverage on them.

Check out this quick slide deck for a walkthrough.

Here are the seven new account types for your quick reference:

Company: The Company account type is meant for professional organisations & firms.

Non Profit/Gov: The Non Profit/Gov account type is meant for non profit institutions, non government organisations, central or provincial governments (or government departments) etc.

University/School: The University/School account type is meant for educational organisations - schools, universities, colleges, classrooms, educational institutions.

AD/PR/Marketing Agency: The AD / PR / Marketing Agency account type is meant for firms dealing in advertising, public relations, marketing etc.

Professional Speaker: The Professional Speaker account type is meant for people who speak frequently at conferences, seminars, events etc.

Presentation Design Firm: The Presentation Design Firm account type is meant for professional firms dealing in presentation design services, trainings etc

Event Organiser: The Event Organiser account type is meant for professional firms that organise events, conferences, trade shows etc.

Let us know what you thought of this new release.

We are launching Social AutoShare. This is a feature that allows users to automatically publish their SlideShare activity - commenting, favoriting, uploading and following to Twitter & Facebook.

Check out this quick tutorial. The process is really easy. It will not take more than a few minutes to link your accounts together. And you can disconnect at will.

Note: This feature in in beta. And we have heard from some users about problems in linking with Twitter. We’re working on this.

There has been a lot going on at SlideShare recently.

Portrait version of SlideShare Playlist: We introduced the SlideShare playlist a few weeks ago . But it was limited to landscape mode. Today, we added support for the portrait version of the playlist. Many of you with blogs/websites with less wide columns will find this useful. Check it out below

| Get your SlideShare Playlist

New Helpdesk: Our customer support channels were not keeping pace with the growth of SlideShare. We are in the process of shifting to a new customer support helpdesk called Zendesk which should help us communicate better with you. Zendesk is a well designed customer support portal and integrates forums & FAQs into customer support in a seamless way. The migration will be complete in a week or so.

The best part about Zendesk is the concept of “Known Issues” where we will post any problems we are already aware of. Please check that before posting problems. You might find answer to your problem. And please be patient with us during this transition. We think that we will be able to be much more effective in solving problems now that we have this system in place.

New FAQs: We are also shifting our FAQs to Zendesk. Check it out here.

New Privacy Policy: Finally, we have done a long overdue update to our privacy policy. It has a lot more details about how we can use your data including sections about related issues such as security and phishing. These questions had come up earlier and users had pointed out that our Privacy Policy (which we had written right before we launched!) was not comprehensive. We care about your privacy and with this updated policy have covered any issues that you might be concerned about. Check it out here.

Following the popularity of the Presentation Pack, we have rolled out a new widget called the SlideShare Playlist. This displays a feed of both presentations and documents (unlike the Presentation pack which showed only presentations).

You can now make a custom playlist with your documents & presentations and embed this on your blog/website. You can also choose a feed from your tags, groups or events, or from your uploaded or favorited SlideShare content. Very useful for libraries, organisations and government institutions. You can give the playlist a custom title as well. Here is a sample…

That’s not all. We have also released a fresh set of Blog Badges using which you can provide a link to your slideshare profile from your blog/website. These badges come in various sizes & shapes, so you are sure to find something that matches your taste. Check these out…

Let us know what you thought of these new releases.

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.