The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is now live. Check out the presentation below for a quick walk through the ruling presentation trends in 2009. The zeitgeist includes some data points about presentations, presentationware, presenters, usage trends etc that would be of interest to just about everyone. We have also sprinkled it with some fun facts & trivia. Our engineering team spent considerable time mining our database so as to come up with these numbers.

The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is being published for open and unrestrained usage. Feel free to quote these figures in your works, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes (we’d appreciate an attribution though).

The Zeitgeist also included community voting for the most inspiring presenters on SlideShare. This activity was ongoing for the last three weeks. The following SlideShare users have been nominated at the top of the charts. Congrats to them for achieving this feat (and also for inspiring the SlideShare community).

1. Christian Heilmann
2. John Resig
3. Dave McClure

Here’s wishing goodbye to 2009. And wishes for a smashing and successful 2010!

On behalf of the entire SlideShare team,

- Rashmi Sinha
Cofounder & CEO

As SlideShare has grown, it has attracted more people. Not surprisingly, it has also attracted some spammers. On looking closer into it, we realize that there are different types of spam.

One is the drive-by spammer who uploads some spammy content and leaves. Its relatively easy to identify this and take the content down.

Harder to detect and remove is “social spam”. For example, a user following thousands of users in the hope of getting a few users to follow back, and therefore getting more distribution of their content. Or users who favorite a lot of content hoping to get people to visit their pages. Or who comments on a lot of presentations with the same hope.

We have started identifying circles of such users who engage in “social spam”. While this is very common on larger sites like Twitter, we want to kill it in to root while its early days on SlideShare.

The community Zeitgeist has attracted its own share of social spam. We have algorithmically detected patterns where a few users are nominating specific users hundreds of times. Closer analysis shows its probably the same person getting nominated / doing the nomination. We have put algorithms into place that will remove all such nominations from the system. If we find evidence that these same people continue trying to spam the Zeitgeist (either by making the nominations, or if you are the person who is getting nominated in this way), then we will ban the account.

Its perfectly ok to ask friends to vote, its not ok to login as another user (or ask another person) to vote hundreds of times. Our algorithms will detect voting fraud – anyone either casting votes like this, or getting such votes will be banned from the Zeitgeist. The goal of the Zeitgeist is to discover people whose content is genuinely popular among a large group of users. We will be doing everything we can to make sure to find genuinely popular users, not those who are manipulating votes.

Update: Our engineers have continued uncovering spam vote trends and removing those votes from the system. These will soon be reflected on the Zeitgeist page itself.

For some time, we have observed that many of you use SlideShare for your business, from a one-person consulting shop to small company to large corporation. Our site surveys confirm this, most of you use SlideShare for your business, in one way or the other.

Today, we are launching a new section of the site : SlideShare Business for all of you who SlideShare for your business.

Its 3 years of SlideShare! 3 years! Hard to believe. From an idea in Jon’s head, it has grown to a vibrant place where millions of people hang out. Last month, we reached a total of 20 million monthly visitors. We beat all sorts of records – the most visitors in a day, the most presentations & documents uploaded in a day, the most registrations.

The daily life of a startup is so hectic. There is always a new feature, a new bug, a new idea to implement. But we wanted to take this day to stop for a moment and thank all of you. We feel lucky to work on SlideShare, lucky that you come to visit, to upload your slides, to check out others.

We have an exciting year ahead of us. Lots of new things up our sleeve.

We are also interesting in hearing – what would like us to do? What new things would you like see on SlideShare?

If you want to rank high for searches on your name which social media channel should you use? This blogpost by Duane “DJ” Sprague describes a test of different channels for search visibility for his name. The experiment was over a 72 hour period.

SlideShare appears to be more effective at creating instant and higher search visibility than YouTube. I have also taken note that with 13 advertising videos on YouTube vs. 15 advertising slide presentations on SlideShare, the videos received 114 downloads in a week compared to 1,556 slide downloads, and the videos had a 3 day head start.

Read more

If you are looking to rank high for your name, our suggestion is to fill out your SlideShare profile completely. Make sure to use your full name (that you are trying to rank high in searches for).

The first contest we ever hosted, the first World’s Best Presentation Contest 2007 was an important landmark for SlideShare.  We discovered gems like Shift Happens and Meet Henry. The second year (2008), we built on that further and quadrupled the number of entries and votes. This year, for World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009, our focus is on presentations as social media objects that get shared online and passed around.

We have asked judges who are experts on presentations & social media to join us in finding the best presentation for 2009. Guy Kawasaki (gkawasaki on SlideShare) has written a lot about presentations and needs no introduction to this community. David Armano, author of Logic & Emotion blog (darmano on SlideShare) is one of the most popular people on SlideShare – his visual communication style is brilliant. Finally, Padmasree Warrior CTO of Cisco (padmasree on SlideShare) has taken communication by a company to a whole another level. Through her talks, tweets and presentations, she has helped us all think about collaboration.

So please enter your presentations into this year’s contest. Give us the best you can create. First prize is MacBook Pro, second is Amazon Kindle while third prize is iPhone 3G. Go here to learn more and full list of prizes.

As in previous years, everyone on SlideShare can vote. But we have something new this year. To choose the finalists, we will go beyond votes and look at tweets and shares on social networks. So, ask your friends / contacts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to check out your entry and vote / tweet / share it. This will add a whole new dimension to this year’s contest. The hashtag for the contest is #bestpreso.

Another new this year – if you use the SlideShare app on our partners services – LinkedIN, Facebook & XING, you can get votes from your friends & colleagues on those networks. If your SlideShare.net account is synched with our LinkedIn, Facebook & XING apps, your SlideShare contest entries will show up there with a strong call for viewers on those networks to vote.

We want to thank our sponsors Adobe Acrobat for helping us bring this contest to you. They recently released Acrobat 9 which also helps you create rich presentations and portfolios. They are also sponsoring a special prize (HP TouchSmart laptop) for the best presentation / portfolio created with Acrobat 9. Judges for this category are social media experts: Julie Hansen, COO of Business Insider, Scott Belsky, founder & CEO of Behance, Harry McCracken editor of Technologizer. For the duration of the contest, you can upload A9 presentations directly to SlideShare. Go here to learn more about the A9 prize.

Best of luck with your entries. The entire SlideShare team is waiting to see your work.

SlideShare goes wherever professionals would want to share presentations & documents. XING is the largest professional network in Europe and many of our users are from Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, France. Today, we are delighted to announce that SlideShare users can now share presentations & documents on XING.

XING has launched its platform today, and we are thrilled that SlideShare is one of the first partners on that platform. Along with SlideShare are other professional applications such as Huddle.net and Dopplr.com.

Think of XING as another place to share your presentations & documents with a professional circle. Another place to get more views and connect with people. You can also checkout what your network has been sharing. Our presentation below will tell you more.

To add SlideShare to your Xing profile, go here.

(if you don’t have a XING account, you might need to signup for one… takes a minute)

Just in case you were not aware, XING is based out of Hamburg, Germany. It has 7.5 million registered members. And here’s a piece of trivia you could care for – in 2006, XING had its IPO and this made it the first Web 2.0 company in the world to go public. WOW!

Something else you should know: With this SlideShare has now established its presence on three of the world’s largest networks for businesses & professionals – LinkedIn, Facebook & XING. If you add these apps and sync them to your SlideShare account, you get a four way sharing. Upload your presentation to any of these four – SlideShare, LinkedIn, Facebook & Xing – it will be published on all four simultaneously!… all in one click!

To add SlideShare to your Xing profile, go here.

The Obama administration has made great strides in using the internet to connect with people. They have videos on YouTube, pictures on Flickr and now, documents & presentations on SlideShare.

Why are documents & presentations important? Because they are used to record and share much of the thinking and ideas in modern life. And they are used by Govt & Public Services as much as they are used by rest of us. Yet, they are locked up in proprietary formats like .doc, pdf, .ppt etc. Sharing is hard as the files are big (and clog up email inboxes). Most presentations & documents live on people’s hard drives. Sometimes people upload them to their websites but that’s still the exception, not the rule.

A lot of documents produced by the various arms of the Gov are meant to be shared with the public. Some of them are for communicating policy. You can read a New York Times article about Whitehouse’s Middle Class Taskforce / Green Jobs initiative, but its different when you can directly view and embed a document about the initiative.

At other times, documents are for getting a message out and making it a part of the conversation on the web. For example, Whitehouse uploaded the President’s speech in Cairo in 15 different languages (Arabic, French, Portugese, Chinese, Dari, Hindi, Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Malay, Turkish, Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi & Indonesian).

Or you can view a presentation about technology policy technology policy from Vivek Kundra, US Chief Information Officer (presentation embedded below).

Please join us in Welcoming President Barack Obama & his White House team to SlideShare.