Just wanted to let our users know that SlideShare is now also available at www.slideshare.com. Till now we have been on the .net URL. A full scale migration to .com will happen subsequently, but for the time being you can just type slideshare.com in your browser and press enter! We promise… you will reach your favorite website safely!

Off course, all the current .net URLs work as before… no change there.

SlideShare is offline right now. If you want to know the backstory and learn what’s been going on for the past week, read this TechCrunch story. We want you to know that we care about the freedom of speech and do not arbitrarily take content down.

Thanks for all of you who have written in with your message of support. This is a tough time for us and we really appreciate knowing that you are with us. We should be back on air very soon. If you are missing SlideShare, add a note, comment here….

Thanks for using SlideShare!

Sergey Chernyshev just released a much-needed piece of code last week: an extension that makes it easy to embed slideshare slideshows into MediaWiki, the open-source wiki software that powers wikipedia.

This is pretty huge: for an organization trying to build a knowledge repository, easy integration between wiki content and social document sharing is a really important. A good example of how this can be used can be found on Sergey’s site TechPresentations.org , which archives presentations from all tech conferences worldwide.

A company that wanted to run a private mediawiki could even upload slideshows to slideshare, not share them publicly, and embed them into their corporate wiki. This would provide a wiki that supported embedded office documents, which would be a killer knowledge-management tool.

Just like Chris Hellman’s slidehare ego widget, this mashup does it’s work without using our API. I’m reminded that RSS and embed codes are powerful integration points with any system. It’s easy to forget that a lot of the time, a formal REST API isn’t even necessary in order to build a mashup!

Some users have sent in complaints that they are experiencing problems with file uploads. We are working to solve this problem. Its seems to be related to some unexpected bug in our code. Please bear with us. Thanks for your patience….

We are happy to announce the launch of the SlideShare user forums. This is being done at GetSatisfaction, which is a fast growing, trendy, community driven discussion forum. GetSatisfaction is described as a ‘people powered customer service’ and it’s design/layout is very contemporary (we really like it!). The conversation has just started picking up there, so please join it and help improve the slideshare experience.

Picture slideshows are hugely popular on slideshare. You are likely to find various genres of them- natural landscapes, personal photographs, screenshots, cartoons etc. Now imagine you have a collection of 30 photographs on your computer and you wish to put them into a slide deck and upload to slideshare. It might be a time-consuming task for most people- opening a powerpoint/ open-office Impress file, inserting the images one-by-one and then uploading. Sounds long-drawn, does it not?

So here’s a way of doing the same thing in a jiffy. This is not a magic potion that we have invented; this function has existed in powerpoint all along (via a feature called Photo Album), but its likely that you are not aware of it. Read along and this could save you a lot of effort next time you want to upload your pictures to slideshare.

Step 1>> Open Powerpoint and go to ‘Insert>Picture>>Photo Album’

Step 2>> Click ‘File/Disk’ and select all your images (jpegs,gifs etc) in the pop-up file selector and press ‘Insert’





Step 3>> Select your desired Picture Layout (1,2,3 etc per slide) and press create; your picture slideshow will automatically be created before you can say Happy Birthday!

Now upload to slideshare as usual. Wasn’t that fast?

We’d like to thank one of our users, alancrean for asking us this question by email. Surely a lot of users stand to gain from his query.

Here’s a bunch of features we rolled out yesterday. Hope you’ll find them useful.

Message Center: Message center is your personal email account on SlideShare and it is accessible from your slidespace. It contains a copy of all private messages sent to you (by other users) for record, as well as notifications for comments, favorites etc. It has standard messaging features like report spam, block user etc.

Slidecasts: We have added a second level navigation for Slidecasts. This will allow you to browse the the latest slidecasts that the slideshare community is creating. You can sort slidecasts by latest (last 300) or popular.

Guest accounts: We have introduced the concept of guest accounts; using this, users can perform a couple of tasks without creating an account- uploading slideshows and commenting. You can sign up for a SlideShare account anytime and all slideshows/comments made as a guest (from that computer) will automatically be transferred to your slideshare account.

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.