Edward Tufte, the renowned author, academic, and speaker best known for his pioneering work on the display of quantitative information, has joined the SlideShare board of advisors. Tufte is the author of “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” and several other books of about the same size and shape. He is also renowned for his groundbreaking essay on presentation design, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” ( summary available).

“SlideShare offers a unique platform to influence the world of presentation design” said Tufte in an interview at his tastefully appointed office at Cheshire, Connecticut this morning. “Thousands of people upload PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare every day. But no one is providing people with guidance as to how to improve their work. It’s often as simple as hitting the delete key!“.

Welcoming Tufte to the board, Jonathan Boutelle (CTO of SlideShare) noted that from today, presentations containing bullet points will not be supported by SlideShare. Special algorithms based on Tufte’s groundbreaking work will parse the PowerPoint file and remove all bullet points, deceptive “chart junk”, and other elements that distract from a presentations effectiveness.

“By implementing algorithms that leverage Tufte’s unique approach to PowerPoint design, we’ll make all of the presentations on SlideShare more compelling and influential than ever!” said Boutelle. “And a unique side effect is that the algorithm compresses the resulting files better than any previous technique we’ve ever tried. Not only does this conserve bandwidth, but (what’s left) of the presentation should download in record time!”

There is a nice write up about SlideCasting in the Content Wrangler, a enterprise & business focused news website. Titled “Webinar Software Under Attack: Google Docs and SlideShare Take Aim“, this is a feature article and talks about how “…both companies are providing consumers with alternatives to pricey webinar software…“. Read the article here.

Thanks Scott Abel for the thumbs up…glad you like our mashup format.

P.S. we are working to add a few punches to slidecasting in the coming weeks; our focus is on bringing down the entry barriers to creating slidecasts, which should help in large scale adoption.

We are tickled pink that Business Week wrote about Slideshare. Recognition from mainstream media! Whoo-hoo! We love blog/ web coverage, but there is something special about seeing the words “Slideshare” in glossy print. I am going to go out and buy a copy of Business Week right now (its in the December 18th issue). The article is behind a login, but we thought you would want to know what they wrote.

Have I Got A PowerPoint For You (Business Week, Dec 18th)

In the beginning, there was MP3 sharing. Then came friend sharing (MySpace), photo sharing (Flickr), and video sharing (YouTube). Now it has come to this: PowerPoint slide sharing.

SlideShare.net offers a place to upload, view, and search for PowerPoint presentations. And since opening up its beta site in October, it has received tens of thousands of files.

The site’s “decks,” as the slide shows are called, are diverse: conference presentations, classroom lessons (”Let’s Learn Colors!” from a middle-school Spanish class), and PowerPoint satire (Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address famously summarized in bullet points, created in 2000 by Peter Norvig, Google’s research director).

Site co-founder Jonathan Boutelle came up with the service while organizing a conference. It will hardly grab as many eyeballs as YouTube, but corporate firewalls won’t block the likes of “Let’s Learn Colors.”

By Jena McGregor (Business Week)

Screenshot is below:

At the “art of the start” conference last week, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch was interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about “How to Get on TechCrunch”. Michael basically said that you shouldn’t use words like “revolutionary” and “web 2.0″ to describe your site: it’s too generic and doesn’t carry any information. He cited slideshare as an example of a good pitch (our pitch was “YouTube for Powerpoint”). Rashmi was called up onto the stage to talk about the “TechCrunch effect” and the effect it had on slideshare.

Here’s the video of rashmi being interviewed. The funniest part is when Rashmi mentions that people upload sermons to slideshare. Guy responded in a deadpan voice “well, God does have 30% market share”. Worth watching!

Jonathan Boutelle, our CTO, has been interviewed in indezine, the a magazine for presentation professionals. Read more here.

Here’s an excerpt:
The most inspiring thing to me about SlideShare is the number of teachers that are using SlideShare to share lessons and lecture slides. I love the idea that we’re helping teachers do the important work of educating the next generation!

Business 2.0 has posted an interview with Jonathan Boutelle, CTO of Slideshare. In it, Jonathan goes into some depth about what kinds of activity we’re seeing on the site, and what kind of features we’re planning for the immediate future.

My favorite quote:
What we’re seeing, though, is that PowerPoint and other presentation formats provide the ability to create narratives and do user-generated multimedia that goes beyond traditional PowerPoint for a talk or business meeting. For example, lots of people are uploading photosets or stories or video game screen shots.

Today’s print edition of the Boston Globe had a nice little writeup of slideshare. It’s on page 2 of the business section.