Important Update: Some of our users had expressed concern over giving us their credentials for our Google Docs Import feature. Well, the good news is that you don’t need to any more. Please have a look at the steps outlined below to help you get started.

We just rolled out the ability to import and share documents from Google Docs on SlideShare. For now we support importing presentations, documents and pdf files. Just follow the steps outlined below to share your work on SlideShare:

1. Make sure you are logged into your SlideShare account before trying to import documents from Google Docs.

2. Click on the “Upload” link on the navigation bar at the top of the page.

3. Click on the “Import from Google Docs” link on the upload page.

4. Authenticate yourself with Google using OAuth and grant us access to get a listing of your documents.

NOTE: We will not ask you for your credentials.

5. Almost done… you should now see a list of documents retrieved from Google. Next, you select the ones you want to import and choose the privacy settings that suit you (private or public). Once you’ve made your selection just click on “Import to SlideShare” and we take care of the rest.

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

Thanks to everyone for their stories. We received more than 2500 entries to the contest! We really appreciate all the hard work you put into it. The five judges Ann Handley, Don Tapscott, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore and Tony Hsieh and going over the entries to choose winners. We will be declaring the results very soon.

Stay tuned. We will also be sending information about your free Fuze Meeting accounts to everyone who submitted an entry. You should receive an email before end of the week.

SlideShare is recruiting software developers for its New Delhi (India) & San Francisco (USA) office.

Working at SlideShare can be a hugely rewarding experience. Building social software is a whole lot of fun. The fast changing web landscape, the constant feedback from users, the technical challenges when millions of people use the site every month. Most of all, you can actually show your friends and family the stuff you work on. All this make being a part of the SlideShare team a different ball-game than the usual technical work.

Benefits include:
- Experience with cutting edge open-source technology
- Working with a team of hackers & geeks, in a “No-BS” environment where you can focus on building great technology that is used by millions of people everyday
- Opportunity to play a decisive role in building a global website
- Competitive Salary + Stock options

Candidate profile:

- Experience : 2 - 5 years, preferably in an internet/web company
- Strong coding skills in application development using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, Javascript, AJAX, LAMP.
- Candidates with exposure to Web 2.0 technologies (blogging, social networking, RSS, XML, APIs, Mashups etc) are preferred
- Must be comfortable working in a small but fast growing startup
Bonus Points
- Prior experience building applications/widgets for social graph platform (Facebook, OpenSocial, iGoogle) is an added advantage
- Prior exposure to Amazon Web Services (S3, EC2, SQS), is an advantage

Send resumes to ‘amit AT slideshare DOT com’ (for Delhi) & ‘jon AT slideshare DOT com” (for San Francisco)

Cliff Atkinson is doing a fun Improv session with 16 volunteers. Dave Mc Clure is up next for the How to pitch to VC’s.

The twitter stream is here: presocampsf. Presentations are here or presocampsf.

SlideShare is looking for a Web Designer to join its New Delhi team. Details below….

Job Description

- Web/Graphical Design of SlideShare: GUI, HTML/CSS, visual design of graphic elements (e.g. forms, logos, banners, blog themes)
- Ship products of the highest quality through strict attention to visual and interaction details
- Requires working in tight co-ordination with a top notch software development team

Desired Candidate Profile

- Degree /diploma in Web design, Graphic Design or Visual communications
- 1 to 4 years experience in similar role (preferably in internet/web company)
- Excellent Web design skills: XHTML (through dreamweaver & coding), CSS, Javascript, basic Ajax
- Good knowledge of W3C web standards, tableless layout, cross browser compatability (IE & FF), SEO friendly markup, graceful website degradation
- Excellent graphic design skills using Photoshop, Illustrator
- Basic knowledge of Macromedia Flash animations (using timeline)
- Ability to troubleshoot HTML/CSS design issues using Firebug, browser plugins & developer tools

Bonus Points

- Candidates with experience in designing/coding blog themes (Wordpress/BlogSpot), Facebook or OpenSocial app interface design, widgets, skinnable media players

Send resumes to ‘amit AT slideshare DOT com’ & ‘rashmi AT slideshare DOT com”

Its been a couple of weeks since we rolled out the YouTube embed feature. And the response from the community has been very encouraging. Here are some interesting examples that we’d like to showcase:

AgfaPhoto Camera’s demolition slide deck: This slide deck narrates the story of Agfa Photos, the German camera manufacturing company that folded up due to competition from Japanese camera manufacturers. Their office building was demolished due to bankruptcy… the deck has a embedded video (slide 2) that together with the pictures (and the text) makes it a compelling story telling package.

Jallikattu Bullfight Of South India: This somewhat controversial event from the Southern part of India is captured brilliantly in this deck which uses some stunning photos (accompanied by description) and a video on the last slide. Does it not make for a compelling package overall (text+photos+video… all in one)?

On Sunday night we moved all the servers that run SlideShare to a new hosting location. It was something that we had been planning for a few months, but these kinds of operations are always high-stress and high-risk. We’re sorry about the downtime. Fortunately, the move seems to have gone pretty well (besides the planned 90 minutes of downtime). Please let us know if you notice anything wonky in the comment section below, and we’ll fix it.

The biggest glitch was that moving the hosting location from California to Texas changed the timezone that the servers operate in. Now why didn’t we think of that? Fortunately this didn’t cause any major problems though, just a few funny glitches in our code.

We’re also really happy with our new host. Softlayer has clearly invested a lot of money in automating all their processes, and in writing a high-quality web application to control the whole thing. As a result:
1) You can order a machine on the web and get access to it in under two hours
2) You can add a hardware firewall or load balancer to your setup on-the-fly with zero downtime and zero human intervention from SoftLayer.
3) You can have an OS reinstall without human intervention: it’s always ready in less than an hour, and it’s always flawless..
4) You have a clear view of all your servers (including their hardware profile) and their status (CPU and RAM use, termperature, etc)

Because getting, reimaging, and controlling machines is so fast and convenient, SoftLayer has a lot of the flexibility of a virtual solution (like Amazon EC2 or similar). But you’re not renting a virtual server, you’re renting a real one. That’s important if you need big, powerful database machines (which we did). Our new database machines have 32 Gigs of RAM each, and 8 15k RPM SCSI drives in a RAID-10 array. That’s serious power! We hope this will be enough to keep SlideShare running fast as we scale up. ;->

We’re lucky in that we already had automated the configuration of most of our servers using a tool called Puppet, so we had code for setting up copies of our existing servers. The fact that we knew we were going to move spurred us on to automate all the rest of our servers the same way. So now our operations crew will be able to spend less time doing maintenance and firefighting, and more time working on new ideas. We try to automate any maintenance and configuration tasks that we do, and we’re really happy that our new host shares this philosophy.

As the year draws to a close, we decided to take a deep look inside slideshare and come up with the ruling trends for the year gone by. We are calling it the SlideShare Zeitgeist 2008…this is a collection of facts & trivia that we hope you will find interesting. We’ll write a quick daily blogpost from today till the 31st of Dec, publishing a few trends … and off course, we’ll also compile this into a slideshare presentation, that you can carry to your blog…so here it comes

Average slides per slideshare presentation: Wondering how long the average presentation for 2008 was? We did some number crunching and the figure turns out to be 21 (21.65 to be accurate). Did that surprise you?

Average words per slide: This is somewhat disturbing… 36. Thats the number of words people are putting into each slide created. (This number is probably skewed by some large, wordy presentation decks, since the average words in the most popular presentations on slideshare is likely to be much lower). The world has a lot to catch up!

Longest slideshare presentation for 2008: This will be hard to believe….. it’s a preso with 1162 slides… yes you read this right. And we’re not linking to it here; that’s the fun part - go search for this on slideshare:-) Wonder whats Guy Kawasaki would have to say about this (Guy has his famous 10-20-30 rule for presentations)?

How many slides per presentation breakup: Here’s the scoop. Enjoy!

1 - 10 slides : 31%
10 - 30 slides : 47%
30 - 50 slides : 13%
50 -100 : 6%
100 - 200 : 1.25%
200 - 300 : 0.17%
300 - 500 : 0.09%
> 500 : 0.03%

Please check back for our blogpost tomorrow for more zeitgeist trends!