For presentations lovers everywhere, we have one more contest for you! This time its about storytelling. We are partnering with Fuze Meeting (who have an awesome online meeting product) to bring you this contest.

A lot of you have already been posting stories to SlideShare. This is an opportunity to get that story inside you onto slides. Tell your story in words and pictures. Add audio or video if you want. Just keep it within 30 slides. Your story could be about anything you care about. Yes, we mean anything. Your travels, a story of a friendship. Or the story of your brand or your product. Make us care, make us think.

And what’s the prize for storytelling. The Grand Prize is $5000! Yes, that’s correct. Imagine what you could do with $5000. We have four other prizes for Best Design, Best StoryTelling Ability, Most Popular and Best Use Of Multimedia. Everyone gets to vote for their favorite entries. Judges will choose the winners from the top voted.

Like before we have assembled a star cast of judges: Tony Hseih, Om Malik, Don Tapscott, Pete Cashmore, and Ann Handley.

Rules are similar to previous contests. You have 3 weeks to enter your presentation to the contest (May 26th to June 15th). Voting will go on till June 22nd. And results will be declared on June 29th.

Thanks to Fuze Meeting who we worked with to dream up this contest and who kindly sponsored the prizes! It has been fun working with Brook and Patrick . Go check out Fuze Meeting.

As usual, we have a presentation about the contest (below). Please help us get the word out. Embed the presentation, share it with your friends. Help us reach every corner of the world where people create presentations.

Angela Connor is an online community strategist and she has written an excellent article about how you can build your own community using SlideShare. Here’s a quick summary of her community building tips:

1. Check to see who has “favorited” and/or “embedded” your slides.
2. Visit their profile and view their slides.
3. Send a personal message asking to connect.
4. Search keywords for your topics of interest. Once you do this, repeat steps 2 and 3.
5. Share your slides on LinkedIn and Facebook.
6. Post thoughtful comments and offer feedback on presentations.
7. Share presentations with others and be sure to let the creator of the slide know about it.
8. Embed slides (yours and others) in blogposts and on your website.
9. Consider sharing more than just slides.

Angela, thanks for the endorsement. We couldn’t agree more.

Next Saturday is PresentationCamp. Come by! (its at the SlideShare offices in San Francisco). Some of the sessions we already have going are:

• How to pitch to VCs (Dave McClure)
• Presentations for non-profits (Beth Kanter)
• What makes for popular presentations online (Rashmi Sinha)
• Integrating Twitter into presentations (Stowe Boyd)
• What is an online presentation? (Nat Robinson)
• Slide makeovers (Rick Altman)
• Compare organization/visuals/delivery for several modes (live, remote-synchronous, remote-unattended) (Nancy Frishberg)
• The Creation Myth – Branding Your Self or Your Organization (Terry Gault)
• Distributing presentations as video (Niall Kennedy)
• How To Turn OC Tendencies Into Excellent Presentations (Jim Meyer)

We are still looking for more sessions (especially smaller workshop / small group feedback type sessions). Please add your sessions to the wiki.

We are also looking for two more projectors. And if you are interested in sponsoring coffee / lunch, drop me a note.

We just released our last and final batch of tickets (go here to register)!

Check out this compilation of 10 awesome SlideShare presentations for marketing folks. This has been published on DPDialogue, an Australian marketing blog.. go here to check out the blogpost.

Incidentally the post starts with this somewhat funny narrative of what things were like in presentation rooms way back in the 1960s-70s before the PC (and Powerpoint era)… Here’s an excerpt

” The presenter would have prepared for weeks; researched diligently and practiced five times the night before, just to make sure everything went according to plan. No stone would have been left unturned. No ‘t’ would have been un-crossed. No ‘i’ left un-dotted.

Slideshare.com, has spelled the end of the extension cord.

We just discovered an excellent Slidecasting series on Travel to China (and Chinese language lessons). This is from a Chinese portal called Travel Chinese Online.

Check out the slidecasts they have created. They are excellently crafted and do justice to the task at hand… the voice-over is loud and clear, the text/fonts are big/bold and the images are crisp.

Have you seen other compelling examples of sldiecasting usage? Do let us know in the comments.

This is an open invitation to all Delhi based SlideShare users and Twitterers to drop by our modest office on Jan 5th for an informal openhouse. On the agenda for the evening are snacks, gossip, socializing, geek-talk, startup-cribs, recession grief-tales and all other things of that ilk. Students, startup entrepreneurs, UX folks, designers, developers, bloggers - all are welcome. The idea is to meet in an informal setting and network.

For more details and registration for the event, please click here.

(P.S. Wi-Fi Internet connection will be available at the venue. Kindly register in advance as the venue can host only a limited number of participants.)

You read that right! SlideShare now has over one million registered users as of the 24th of November.

A big shout out to the awesome community that has grown around SlideShare for making this possible. Honestly, this would not have been possible without the support and participation of all our users.

And of course, thanks and congratulations to ThinkPublic, our millionth registered user!

Here’s looking to 10 million!

The Financial Times, one of the most widely read business and financial newspapers in the world carried a story on how “Companies woo investors with social websites.”

The story quoted a report as saying that “companies are increasingly turning to social media sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and SlideShare to communicate with investors”

We’re thrilled not only to be covered by the FT, but also because the story confirms our long held gut feelings. The report went on to say that about half of the 150 largest companies in Europe put presentations on SlideShare, photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube. The report also said that most people looked beyond the corporate sites for information and the new user generated content sites were the first places they looked.

So, if you want to make that great first impression on your customers, there’s no better time to upload your presentations to SlideShare!