Wednesday 9 PM PST: SlideShare will be inaccessible for an hour, as we are performing some db upgrades. Be right back. Promise

One of the new mantras of social media is that you need to create content to connect with people. But what does that really mean? Should you start hiring bloggers? Or should you start creating videos? presentations? What type of content? This presentation from Barbra Gago below answers that question.

View more presentations from Barbra Gago.

It never ceases to amaze me the different ways people dream up of using SlideShare. This Bulgarian chess club has uploaded almost 40 presentations.

Each of the presentations depicts a set of chess moves. Browse through the one below.

Voting on the SlideShare Holiday Spirit Contest 2009 has ended on the 5th. The winners for the contest will be announced in a couple of days.

As always, before finalising the contest results, we will run our exhaustive check to detect any voting malpractises. This will involve anti spam algorithms and IP address checks to weed out possible rigging. Rest assured – the winners for the contest would be chosen in a fair manner and in sync with the contest rules.

Our servers are getting software upgrades. We’ll be down for some time. Should be back pretty soon… Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/slideshare for latest updates.

UPDATE: Our servers like shiny new software. We’re back in full swing now. And things should be fine.
(This was a major upgrade, so just in case you are still facing issues, do let us know in the comments on this blogpost)

A few days ago, I announced a new section of our blog focusing on social media for businesses. Today I would like to introduce our first blogger for this section – Ross Mayfield – longtime SlideShare advisor, Founder and President of SocialText, the first wiki company. Ross has a deep understanding of social media and writes, speaks and blogs about these topics regularly. He blogs at http://ross.typepad.com/.

As we grown the social media for business section on this blog, it will be great to have Ross blogging here and sharing his insights about this topic.

Not surprisingly, we have found some spammy nomination patterns in the Zeitgeist. Without going into specifics, we found patterns where a few voters are making hundreds of nominations, nominating the same person everytime. This seems to be a systmatic, and very different than normal voting patterns.

We are removing such votes from the system. Future votes from these users will not be counted as well. We have also developed algorithms to detect other types of spammy activities in the Zeitgeist, and will be regularly removing such votes from the system. If you see changes in the nomination count, this is the reason.

Our goal with the Zeitgeist is to find genuinely popular users whose content people love enough to nominate. Nominating yourself or your friend hundreds of times does not count!

Starting today, we have a new guest blogger for the SlideShare blog. Beth Kanter who is a well known expert in the non-profit field will be blogging about presentations and social media for non profits. Beth is remarkable in her use of social media – she is an early adopter of many tools and is good at figuring out how to use them in them in her work. She is generous in sharing that knowledge on her blogh, through presentations. She is also a friend and I am delighted to welcome her to the SlideShare blog.

If you are a non profit, then subscribe to this blog feed to hear what Beth has to say.