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…..

Slideshare is getting widgetised! We’ve got tons of feedback from our users asking for diff kinds of widgets. So we have added a “Widgets” tab to our top navigation. This takes you to the widgets page where you can (currently) choose from two types- the Mini Badges & the Blog Sidebar Widget.

Mini Badges: These provide a way of linking to your slideshare presentations from your blog or website; the badges are small and can fit in just about anywhere…. examples below

Blog Sidebar Widget: These are essentially slideshow feeds that can be embedded into your blog’s sidebar; you can choose to show your own slideshare presentations, or from your favorites, groups, events etc. You can also show slides from a particular tag. Just grab the embed code and put into your blog’s sidebar template…examples below

We plan to add a couple of other widgets to our collection…stay tuned. And do let us know how you liked the current ones!

This is probably our biggest release to date. Ever since we launched, the most strident feature request from our users has been the private sharing of documents on Slideshare. We’ve had lots of people writing to us about privacy and how it could help them in their work lives. We are happy to bring that wait to an end. It’s taken us a while to arrive at the best way of doing this, but we think the result should be worth the wait.

Slideshare now has FULL FEATURE PRIVACY. And its COMPLETELY FREE!. You get complete control over who, what, how to share! The privacy feature should address (but not be limited to) the following use cases-

- keeping slideshows private to yourself; this comes with complete freedom to switch back and forth between private & public without any restrictions

- sharing with all your contacts

- sharing with only some of your contacts (we have introduced the ability to make user lists from your contacts and share documents only with that list)

- every private slideshow will now (optionally) have a Secret URL; you can send this URL to anybody by email, IM etc (irrespective of whether that person has an account on slideshare or not) and the slideshow will be viewable by him/her

- you can turn off the embedding (embed code) for private slideshows; this allows you to control the virality and propogation of your slides

- you can send business presentations to your clients, customers, office colleagues for private viewing

- you can embed slideshows on password protected websites, company intranets without apprehension about the documents appearing publicly on slideshare

- you can virtually use your slideshare account like an online repository, uploading presentations for public or private sharing; there is of-course no restriction to how many files you can have in your account or any usage/bandwidth limits.

We’re sure there are many other uses that our users will bring out for this much-requested feature. We look forward to them. Do send us your feedback about what you liked (or did not like) about privacy on slideshare.

Here’s a bunch of new features we pushed out to our servers:

Video Embeds in comments: Now you can embed a video in the comments section for the slideshow and it will play as usual. We are starting off with videos from a few popular video sharing sites - Youtube, GoogleVideos, BlipTV, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Viddler (we’ll add other sites to that list if our users want it). This feature can be useful to augment your presentation on slideshare with accompanying videos about the event. Check out some examples here, here & here. Screenshot below

New Embed Player: We have introduced a new embed player for your slideshows. This player has a wider range of functions that the earlier one. It allows you to get the embed code or bookmark the slidehow (using Gigya) directly from the embed, without having to come to the site. This is the player you will now get, if you copy the embed code from slideshare. However, for slideshows that have been embedded earlier in blogs/websites, the new player will show up only if the earlier embed code is replaced with the new one from the site.

Other improvements that have been implemented-

- the site should be faster and more responsive now; adding contacts, making comments or favorites should be quicker than before; also there was a problem of duplicate comments, favorites that were automatically getting generated- those should be gone now
- you should be able to remove slideshows from a group (there was a bug which prevented this from happening)
- “share a slideshow” (by email) gets more meat now; you can directly add users from your contact list; email IDs of non slideshare users who were forwarded slideshows will also be remembered by the system (last 10)

Let us know your feedback for all these…..

One of our users has created a SlideShare browser search plugin . We tested it and it works fine for Firefox & IE. So if you want to search for content on slideshare directly from within your browser, go to the mozdev website, click on the slideshare hyperlink and install the plugin. This will allow you to find slideshows on slideshare directly from your browser. Isn’t that cool!

Big thanks to cupcake13731 for creating this.

Screenshot below

Searching for content on slideshare just got easier! We have rolled out a new search engine. This was long overdue and has been requested by the slideshare community on previous ocassions. Until now we had been using Google custom search.

You can now search for slideshows, users & groups. Results can be viewed in a list or a grid layout. And there is an advanced search as well for drilling deep down into the content. You can also splice the search results by 11 international languages.

And for the technical minded, this new search engine is powered by Ferret, which is an open source, full-featured text search engine library written for Ruby. A big thanks to the Ferret team for this awesome project.

We’d love your feedback on this. Do let us about this can be further improved.

Screenshots below!

List View

Grid View

We pushed out a couple of enhancements yesterday:

New Upload methods: In addition to the bulk upload & the single upload for uploading your files to slideshare, we have released three additional ways to upload content.

URL upload: This is a super quick way of getting your slide decks on to slideshare, if you have them already uploaded on the web. If your file has a downloadable URL, you can copy the URL and enter it here and hit publish. We take care of the rest of the work. You can do multiple such uploads at one go. This feature has been requested on many earlier ocassions by conference organisers, librarians etc and we thought it made perfect sense.

Email Upload: If you have a registered account on slideshare, you will find a unique email ID on this page; send your file as an attachment to this email ID; it will get uploaded to your slideshare account. You can send the mail from any email address whatsoever and this will work! The subject of your mail will become the slideshow title and anything you put in the body will be the description. Isn’t this cool?

Not just that, even if you don’t have an account on slideshare, you can still upload the file by email. Use the generic email ID that is mentioned on the email upload page (for not logged in users); your file will be uploaded to an account that gets created for you: you will be mailed back its login & password, so that you can edit the presentation later and start using slideshare. You could also think of this feature as an indirect way of opening an account on slideshare by email.

Browser Plugin: We have released browser plugins for Internet Explorer & Firefox. Download these plugins from the browser upload page, install in your browser. Then go to the URL of the file you want to upload, hover on it, do a right click and click “upload to slideshare”. This will directly take you to the single upload page with the file URL selected. Publish as usual and this file will show up in your account.

Bookmarking Tool (Add This): We have released a third party bookmarking tool; using this widget, you can bookmark your slideshows on popular bookmarking services like delicious, furl, reddit, digg etc. This widget shows up on the slideshow page (at the left bottom of the slideshow player)

Let us know your feedback about these new features…

For the last several months, we’ve been toiling away on a really ambitious project. Our goal : the integration of web audio with slideshows.

Today we’re psyched to introduce a new multimedia format that we hope will revolutionize the way knowledge is shared on the web. We call it “SlideCasting” (SlideShows + podcasting). Slidecasting makes previously static web slideshows true, compelling multimedia experiences.

Here’s what SlideCasting means. You can connect any mp3 on the web to your slideshow. Once you do that, you can synchronize *each* slide to a particular section of the audio track. This means that you can now use slideshare to truly share a talk, instead of just the slides from a talk. And instead of having to listen to the entire mp3, listeners can use slideshare to quickly navigate to the section of the talk that they are interested in listening to. We think this might make podcasting a lot more mainstream, by providing an easy way to visually navigate them.

We’re pretty proud of the synchronization tool we’ve built for slidecasting. It is a Flash rich internet application that shows your slideshow and a visualization of the sound signal from the mp3. You can easily navigate around your slideshow (and the audio file) and edit the synchronization between the two by dragging and dropping. It took a LOT of work to get right: I can say without exaggeration that this was the hardest technical and design task we’ve taken on so far with slideshare. Go here to watch a screencast of how it works. And this is what the end result is like.

Getting this tool right took many iterations: it is designed for intensive use by multimedia producers. We think our interface provides an efficient, intuitive, and pleasurable way to synchronize an audio track to a slideshow.

For the lazy, we also offer a couple of simpler options: you can associate your slideshow with an mp3 file WITHOUT doing any synchronization. Or you can evenly divide your mp3 track between the all your slides with a single click (this works great for music files that you want to associate with photo slideshows)

We can’t wait to see what our amazing, creative, passionate users will do with this new multimedia format.