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.

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT) has published a list of the Top 100 tools for learning professionals (consultants, analysts, developers, practitioners, academics, etc). And Slideshare shares the No 26th spot along with FaceBook, Wikipedia & Ning. Ranked ahead of Slideshare are names that we are all too familiar with- Firefox, del.icio.us, Skype, Google search, Wordpress, Flickr, Powerpoint, Gmail, Word, Excel plus a few other tools of similar stature. Check out the complete list here. The selection by done by a jury that consisted of 101 of the world’s top learning professionals. This is the page where SlideShare is talked about on C4LPT’s website. Check out some of the comments Slideshare has received from the jury members.

We are happy at this recognition and would like to thank all our users for making this possible.

We rolled out a couple of features that you should find useful:

Screenshot:

Embed counts: How cool it could be if you knew where your slideshows have been embedded, how many views each embed is getting etc? Well, you can do that now. On the slideshow page, you will get to see the embed count. This shows how many times the slideshow has been embedded on different blogs, websites, forums etc. Click on the “Stats” link and you will land at the statistics section, where you get a breakup of how many views happened on Slideshare and how many have come from the embeds. And you get a list of all the blog, website urls where the slideshow has been embedded. Isin’t this cool?

So from now on, the views in your slideshow will be a summation of the views on slideshare and the views from embeds. The views from embeds will be counted from 8/11/2007; views prior to this will not be added. So unfortunately, the millions of views for slideshare embeds on blogs, websites etc prior to this date will not be taken into consideration. This is because of technical reasons. We are not happy about this, but its better late than never. Please note that

- for slideshows that were embedded prior to 8/11- the embed count will initially be much lower than the actual, but will build up gradually over a few weeks. This is on account of how we have implemented this technology (which has been quite a task!). We estimate that in 4-6 weeks, the embed count should reflect the actual number of embeds.

- for slideshows embedded post 8/11- you get actual embed counts straightaway

Gigya Widget for publishing to MySpace, Friendster, Facebook- We have implemented a third party widget (Gigya) to help you publish your slideshows on different social networks. Just click the post to button , select where you want to publish, enter your pw/login etc and you’re done. This is as easy as its gets! Thanks Gigya for making this super cool widget.

Let us know what you think of these new additions.

Colleges have required essays for a long time, but this business school is asking applicants to submit four slides. The dean for admissions says: “”To me, this is just four pieces of blank paper. You do what you want. It can be a presentation. It can be poetry. It can be anything.” They say partly its to end the boredom from reading thousands of repetitive essays about “Why University X is right for you?”.

What do SlideShare users think about it? Is requiring slides a good idea? A horrendously bad one? Or is the answer “It depends!”. [thanks to Andy Sernovitz for sending me this link]