PST 9.10 AM: We are facing some problems in our file conversion servers; we noticed this a couple of hours back and our systems guys are working hard through the night (in India) to get this back on track. Expect some delay before your uploaded files will get converted to our flash format for viewing on slideshare.

Thanks for bearing with us.

Update PST 9:50: Approximate wait time conversion seems to be four hours or so. The remaining machines that do the conversion are working non-stop, so your files WILL go through: it’ll just take longer than it should.

Jaehan Ray is a 25 year old student from Daegu, South Korean who we met at the Slideshare office in Delhi recently; so how did he land up there? Well the answer is kinda storylike…read on if you want to hear it firsthand.

Jaehan was on the cusp of finishing his education and move on to a job (much like his other friends) when he decided that this could wait. His big dream in life is to travel around the world, meet diff people and learn about their language & culture. He thought travel is one of the biggest educational experiences one can have. So he created a slide deck (embedded below) to explain his idea and show it to others. He also happened to upload it to slideshare, where we found it and liked it so much, that his slidedeck was featured as the ‘slideshow of the day‘ on our homepage (some four months back). In the presentation, Jaehan had indicated his travel route across Asia & Europe and I noticed that it passed through India. I left behind a comment on the slideshow inviting him to visit the slideshare office. While passing through Delhi last week, Jaehan spent a couple of hours at our office, chatting with the slideshare developers and telling us about South Korean life (including its massive internet orientation). We also shot a small video (below) while he was here.

Thanks Jaehan! We enjoyed meeting you. This world is really a small place over the web and we’re happy slideshare played a small part in enabling our meeting!

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Running a site like SlideShare, you get used to all the PowerPoint jokes. Heck, we enjoy them! When we first came out, the best coverage was comments like: Bore people around the world. We have been told that we are the worst website in the world (I have met the person who made the comment and he’s rather nice (and uses SlideShare now ;-).

Anyway, working at a startup can get pretty intense, and we are always looking for ways to amuse ourselves. One of our users came up with an amusing take on Presentations, which he called PowerPointless (embedded below): Create powerpoints using ONLY existing themes and existing Microsoft clipart!

We are inviting you to take this concept and run with it. Create the PowerPointless. Upload a slideshow and tag it with the word “powerpointless”. We will highlight your PowerPointLess contributions on our home page every two weeks. It can be anything that is an amusing take on PowerPoint. Make our grim content editor laugh and we will put you on the front page.

How to enter: 1) Create something powerpointless (and find someone else’s stuff and share it - with their permission of course). The rules are deliberetly vague - it should be amusing. Make our grim content editor (we won’t tell you who it is) laugh! It should be something about presentations. Or something related which amuses us.

2) Important: Upload and tag it “powerpointless” so that we find it.

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As some of you have been facing issues with file conversions being slow, we’re working on this; we hope to restore normalcy in this matter soon. Thanks for your patience!

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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