As many of you have noticed, slide download is not working on many of the cases. We are aware of this problem and are working on fixing it. Thanks for your patience!

One of our users has created this sweet birthday cartoon for slideshare. Check it out here! Thanks for this.

Seemingly, there are other ones as well…

Several of you have written in to say that the site has been very slow recently. Just wanted to say that we are aware of site performance problems and looking into this. We have been experiencing heavy traffic which accounts for part of it. But there seem to be other issues as well (specially with sending feedback, commenting, favoriting, adding contact, pings, messages etc) that are causing the site to be slow recently. We are looking into ways of solving this. This is our number one concern right now.

Thanks for your patience while we try to solve this. And thanks for using SlideShare :->

SlideShare turned one today. We launched on the night of Oct 4-5 (PST) in 2006 and what a year it has been? What started out as a resolve to build a simple webapp for sharing our own presentation slides from conferences, barcamps etc has metamorphosed into what is unarguably the world’s largest online community for sharing presentations on the web. We soon discovered that the presentation use case was just the tip of the iceberg; all kinds of people started using slideshare- teachers, corporates, professionals, consultants, librarians, designers, jokers, pranksters, artists, bloggers, marketers, advertisers, investors, photographers, painters, students, podcasters, conference organisers & speakers, gardeners, priests, soldiers et al (I could go on & on…). Our traffic numbers are consistently rising and we just crossed 3 million unique monthly visitors mark in September.

In line with what has now become a web tradition, we have temporarily tweaked the slideshare logo to mark the anniversary. Tell us what you think of the change!

On behalf of the SlideShare team, I’d like to thank all our users for taking SlideShare to this level. We’ve heard from lots of people that SlideShare’s community is unique…very few social webapps have this kind of a user base. We are REALLY proud of our community.

To commemorate the first anniversary, we decided to dig deeper into our database and identify some of our most active/popular users during the first year. A special word of thanks to these users, who have contributed so much to slideshare.

User with the most comments on slideshare: spiderweb99
User with the most uploaded slideshows: MegaaMiga
User with maximum featured slideshows on the homepage: meisterjoker
User with the most slidecasts till now: MegaaMiga
User who has been added as a contact by maximum no of people: darmano
User with most overall views for his/her slideshows: javiteran, jbrenman, rado_fun (this was a close tie between all three)

Going forward into our second year, we hope to make slideshare more relevant to your working lives. There are at least three major releases that we have planned in the coming year that should help us achieve that. One of those is actually more than just a release, it has the potential to make slideshare 3X more useful. But you’ll have to wait for that…just a little bit…

Thanks a lot once again and happy slidesharing!

Here’s a bunch of snaps from the anniversary celebration at out Delhi office..

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The “Meet Henry” slide deck that won the second prize in The World’s Best Presentation Contest has achieved cult status. It has spawned off a completely new genre of visual communication. Our editorial team keeps bumping into Meet Henry inspired slideshows every day on SlideShare and so decided to create a Meet Henry group. A bunch of slideshows have been added to that group; there could be others as well, that have escaped our attention, so if you find them, please add it to this group. Kudos to Ethos3 Communication for creating this viral masterpiece.

Something else worth pointing out is that Slideshare now has an awesome collection of presentations on Enterprise 2.0. Check out these two groups- Enterprise 2.0 & e2camp.net. In fact we can sense a Enterprise 2.0 micro-community getting nucleated around these slideshows.

Lets keep them coming. And here’s wishing even more “Meet Henrys” to follow.

The winner of the World’s Best Presentation Contest is Jeff Brenman with “Shift Happens”. He also won the Second Prize in the People’s Choice Awards. I have to admit I had been curious about Jeff from the moment I saw his first presentation (Crossing Senses). Here’s Jeff for you…

1) Tell us a little about yourself? About your background, where you are based, what you do for a living?
I’m a graduate from Northwestern University where I studied psychology and business. For about as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with human perception and technology. At universities these days it’s no secret that the professors almost all use PowerPoint to accompany their lectures. It was pretty early on in my college experience that I became disenchanted with the “conventional” presentation styles and started to independently study the theory behind what makes great presentations great. It wasn’t long before I was helping out a few of my professors and student leaders on campus with their slide decks, eventually having a position created for me with the university as a presentation design consultant. I realized I have a knack for helping people tell their stories, so I decided after I graduated to make a business of it. I started a design firm called Apollo Ideas, specializing in presentation design and consulting and have been helping people and businesses present their stories. I am based out of the great city of Chicago.

2) Do you design a lot of presentations?
Yes. I have been making presentations for the past several years both for personal projects and for educators, lecturers, and more recently, businesses and business leaders.

3) When and how did you create this presentation?
I created ShiftHappens about two months ago. I came across Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know” presentation online and thought the content was fantastic. I had just finished reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, so the globalization themes in Karl’s presentation resonated hard with me. I decided to re-stylize the presentation as a challenge to myself, to re-make it how I’d like to see it. I am glad ShiftHappens has received so much attention through SlideShare because the reality of the 21st century is a subject we all ought to know about.

4) Who are your inspirations when it comes to designing presentations?
There are many presenters whose work I admire. Some of the people who have inspired me most are Edward Tufte, Garr Reynolds, Steve Jobs, Al Gore, and Carl Sagan.

5) What advise do you have for SlideShare users who want to design great presentations?
My advice? Forget everything you know about PowerPoint. Instead of approaching a presentation with a template editor, approach your presentation as a presentation (yes you read that correctly). Think about the story you want to tell your audience and begin by creating an engaging speech to convey it. The presentation comes from you, not the screen behind you. Think of the your slides as big white canvases on which you can paint anything you want to help you tell your story. Keep them simple. There seems to exist a standard for how a powerpoint presentation should look and sound, but the standard is pretty sub-par. Do your own thing, focus on telling your story, and your presentations will shine.

6) How long have you been using SlideShare? How did you discover it? Do you have any interesting stories about your SlideShare experiences?
I have been using SlideShare for about two months. I stumbled across the site after seeing a presentation embedded on a blog in SlideShare’s format. As someone into presentations, I was intrigued by the technology. Browsing around the site I realized how useful SlideShare’s technology was. Rather than emailing a 20MB presentation to dozens of clients, it is much more practical to be able to post it online.

As some of you might know, we just wrapped up our first contest! I was curious about the winners- who they are, and where they got their inspiration from. I decided to email a few questions to the winners. The first interview we are posting is with Chris Landry, winner of the Third Prize for his slideshow ‘Sustainable Food Lab‘.

1) Tell us a little about yourself? About your background, where you are based, what you do for a living?

I’ve been working in the non-profit field for close to twenty years, originally as a museum exhibit designer but for the past twelve years or so in fundraising and communications. I’m currently serving as Director of Development & Communications for the Sustainable Food Lab, which is an effort to accelerate the movement of economic, social, and environmental sustainability into mainstream food systems. We’re working with many of the world’s leading food companies as well as with respected organizations like Oxfam and World Wildlife to find solutions to complex problems: hunger and poverty issues, public health issues such as obesity and diabetes, land, water, and climate issues, and so on. I live in western Massachusetts and work mostly from home. Once a week I drive up to Vermont to the office of the Sustainability Institute, which is the Food Lab’s parent organization. I have an M.Ed with a special interest in learning theory — and I use that theory all the time as I think about how to design presentations that help people learn.

2) Do you design a lot of presentations?

A fair number. At the Food Lab we’ve been working with to design one basic presentation that any of our staff or organizational members can adapt to their own needs. That ends up being pretty difficult to do, impossible really, so we end up revising it a lot for specific needs and audiences.

3) When and how did you create this presentation?

I’ve been messing around with this presentation since the fall and I’m still tinkering with it. I use Keynote to create the presentations on my MacBook, then convert into PowerPoint so our PC-using colleagues are set to go.

4) Who are your inspirations when it comes to designing presentations?

I love Garr Reynolds’ site, Presentation Zen — it’s a wonderful resource. I also enjoy reading Seth Godin’s thoughts, and Guy Kawasaki’s. Beyond that, I think we need to find our own style that works for us, and the inspiration can come from anywhere. I read a lot of poetry, and write some myself, and I think any creative outlet like that makes you a better storyteller. Read a really good poem by someone like Wendell Berry and you see how a very few words can convey an enormous amount.

5) What advice do you have for SlideShare users who want to design great presentations?

I think the first ingredient is reading. There’s a lot of wonderful information available about how people learn, what makes communication work, what gets in the way. If your goal is to be an outstanding presenter (and why bother if it’s not?), then it’s crazy to be flying blind when our own experience tells us that most presentations are mediocre or worse. Like anything else — gardening, cooking, music, theater — you’re a lot better off if your work is grounded in a theory or philosophical approach.

Then start with blank slides, not pre-made templates. Use strong images, a small number of words, a reason for each slide to exist. Ask yourself why any of the slides need to exist — maybe you’re better off with no slides for a particular talk, or just a few slides to highlight key points. The point is, you have to challenge your usual habits, or you’re going to be sleepwalking, doing it the same way you always have. And if you’re sleepwalking, your audience will fall asleep with you. Finally, always think of your presentation as a work in progress. Revise continuously based on what seems to work with audiences.

6) How long have you been using SlideShare? How did you discover it? Do you have any interesting stories about your SlideShare experiences?

I discovered Slideshare a few months ago via Presentation Zen. It’s been a lot of fun to see what people are creating. Now that downloading is possible, it’ll be an especially useful way to share our work with people from all over.

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Tomorrow- interview with Cheree Moore & Scott Schwertly who created ‘Meet Henry’, which won the Second Prize and the People’s Choice Third Prize.

This was not our choice. SlideShare is an international site and we wanted users from all countries to participate. We had asked our lawyers to include as many countries as they could. Apparently, there are international contest law issues, due to which you can open it to only a few countries. I wish we had pushed our lawyers even harder.

My apologies to those users who can not participate in the contest. I understand your frustration. Next time, we shall go all out to include as many countries as we possibly can (paying special attention to countries where we have heard from users about this issue).