We’re celebrating our third birthday! Here’s a live video feed so that community members who aren’t in San Francisco can still be there.
Watch live video from slideshare on Justin.tv

Everyday for the next week (Oct 9th - Oct 16th), we are giving away $25 each to 10 SlideShare Business users!

Its easy to win. Start a LeadShare or AdShare campaign. Post your SlideShare username along with hashtag #leadshare or #adshare to Twitter. For example, “I just started a #leadshare campaign. My slideshare username is mikesmith”

Everyday, we will do a random draw from the previous days’ qualifying tweets. Winners will be announced daily on this blog post. $25 credits will be added to your SlideShare account (the username that you name in your tweet).

(In order to qualify : You need to have at least one presentation / document in your SlideShare account. Additionally, you need to have setup a LeadShare or a AdShare campaign. You can win only once. $25 in credits will be added to your SlideShare Business account. You can be disqualified from this drawing if content in your account is spammy or otherwise inappropriate. All decisions all final.)
Winning users can credits for either LeadShare / AdShare or a mix of both.)

We know you are waiting for the results and wanted let you know that we are still waiting to hear back from a few more judges. Results will be announced on Tuesday the 29th. Thanks for your patience!

Parents on SlideShare have a new place to go to learn, and share household tools, tips and tricks. The Parent Toolbox Channel, sponsored by Microsoft Office brings you content and community related to home and family.

There are three groups within the Parent Toolbox Channel

• Fun & Games: exciting activities for the whole family to unwind
• Home Organization & Money: worksheets, presentations & forms for a more efficient household
• School & Writing: ways how to help your kids learn and grow

You have an opportunity to share your own content on these topics. You might even win a copy of Microsoft Office. Just upload as usual and add it to the relevant groups. Go here to learn more.

Blogger Asha Dornfest from Parent Hacks will be curating content. We’ve also invited other leading parenting bloggers contribute. Expect relevant presentations, documents and even blog posts. You can comment, favorite, subscribe to content or even upload your own.

We’re really excited about the Parent Toolbox Channel and we hope you’ll love it as much as we do. We can’t wait to see all your uploads.

This is a bi monthly guest post from Scott Schwertly of Ethos 3. He will be regularly blogging on the SlideShare site. Welcome Scott!

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Most of us have had the privilege this summer to meet the most Inglorious of all Bastards, Lt. Aldo Raine. He is the hillbilly straight from the mountains of Tennessee who finds a way to bring justice back into an unjust world. In theory, the world of presentations is experiencing the same injustice – a needless death of presentations. Let’s take a few quotation cues from Lt. Adlo Raine and his Inglorious Bastards:

1. “We got a German here who wants to die for his country! Oblige him!”

Let’s face it! Some people just don’t get it when it comes to reviving the way presentations are done. They don’t like innovation. They don’t like new ideas. They don’t like change. At the end of the day, you can only do much to convince the skeptics. You can show them the way, but if they refuse to change then let them go.

2. “I’m gonna give you a little somethin’ you can’t take off.”

The whole goal of any presentation is to make it memorable. Simplify your message. Choose the right visuals. Tell a story. Pull at the heart-strings. Better yet, get a conversation started on Twitter about your presentation. Make it memorable. If it is not, then you have failed. Do something your audience will never forget.

3. “You know somethin’, Utivich? I think this might just be my masterpiece.”

The only way you will every a true presentation masterpiece is to build, design, and deliver your presentation the right way. If you build your presentation correctly, but design it incorrectly – what’s the point? If you design your presentation correctly, but delivery it incorrectly – what’s the point? If you deliver your presentation correctly, but you build it incorrectly – what’s the point? Well, you get the point. Masterpieces take time. They take patience. They take due diligence.

4. “You see, we’re in the business of killin’ Nazis, and boy, business is boomin’.”

The good news is that despite all the work that needs to be done regarding presentations, 2009 is shaping up to be the year of the presentation. There are so many great things happening in the industry right now – less bullet points, more images, better storytelling – it’s boomin’.

5. “…I think you show great talent. And I pride myself on having an eye for that kind of talent. But your status as a Nazi killer is still amateur. We all come here to see if you wanna go pro.”

Let’s admit it. The world is full of presentation amateurs. It’s time to go pro. Think different. Design different. Be different.

About the Author: Scott Schwertly is an epic storyteller. Today, he owns and operates Ethos3 Communications (http://www.ethos3.com), a Nashville, TN-based presentation boutique providing professional presentation design and training for national and international clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to branded individuals like Guy Kawasaki.

He may live in Nashville, TN with his wife and three dogs, but he calls San Diego home – the place of his beloved San Diego Chargers. Scott has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harding University.

Business Week columnist Carmine Gallo writes about how to give a lousy presentation. Some of the techniques for lousy presentations include “creating distracting color combinations”, “using wild animations”.

Go here to read the whole article. Good read to remind yourself what not to do when giving presentations.

The Applicant blog has a great post listing 7 SlideShare presentations for job seekers. Head here to check out the post…

Over the weekend, we’ve been getting reports of visitors to slideshare getting popups that say “your computer is unsecure”.  Naturally, we cancelled our weekend plans, rolled up our sleeves, and started looking for potential security issues with our servers, our javascript, our advertising .. everything.  At 5PM Sunday we figured out what the problem was (it was an advertisement, as we had suspected).

At this point we are 99.99% sure we have fixed the problem.  We apologize to anyone who was effected by this. We are rolling out processes to make sure that this never happens again.  If anyone sees anything suspicious please email me at jon AT slideshare DOT com.

Thanks to everyone who sent us feedback email! Realtime information from numerous SlideShare users was what helped us to identify the problem.