There are SlideShare members from all over the world - in Sudan, in Hawaii, in Sydney and Helsinki. We have been noticing how many people upload slides about their cities and countries. Generally, its a bunch of pictures and some commentary. I love watching such slideshows. Many are about places I have never been, but would really like to go. Some of them are embedded below. I hope you enjoy them as well.

Of course, we have slideshows about London!

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And how we have London, and not have Paris.

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Some city slides about Jaisalmer, golden city in the north western part of India.

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These slides were shared with love from Romania

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And here is a slideshow about Berlin

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Go to this group to check out more. And if you have a city slideshow, please do share it in the City and Country Slides group on SlideShare!

My friend Brian posted this on Twitter and it reminded me of the situation I inevitably find myself right before a talk - making last minute adjustments to my slides! Its as if I cannot stop making changes till the last moment before I upload to SlideShare (yes, I use SlideShare to give all my talks). It also seems that it does not matter how early I start. I might start talk preparation 2 weeks before or 2 days before, I will still be making changes at the last moment.

Are you one of those people who is always working on their slides at the last moment? Or do you get them well ahead of time? Tell us about your slide preparation style?

Michael Sampson recently posted on his blog about using SlideShare to share slides privately for a conference review. We are reprinting his post below with his permission.

If you have used private sharing on SlideShare in an innovative way, please tell us about it! We are interested in your story. Add a comment below, or post to your blog and send us a link.

Michael’s post is reproduced below and here is a link to the original post.

How We Got Feedback on Slide Decks from the Advisory Board: Thanks to SlideShare.net for its Private Slide Deck Feature

Eric is back home after two weeks in Manila, with a week of that presenting at the Beyond Planning: eProductivity conference. I am yet to debrief with him on how it went, but I wanted to share something that we did in getting ready. He had about 30 unique presentations to give over the 5 days of the conference, and for the first batch of those we wanted to run the slide decks past our advisory board (we ran out of runway to do them all like this). But when there is such a diversity of topics to be covered, and a similar diversity of interest among the advisory board members, how do you decide which slide decks to send to which people? I knew in broad terms their areas of interest, but I didn’t want to limit them to just those areas if they wanted to weigh in on others. And I didn’t want to send out 20 different slide decks by email.

The solution I hit on was to set up a private, password-controlled blog under my TypePad account, and to upload all of the slide decks to SlideShare.net, ensuring that I turned on the private slide deck setting at SlideShare (a recent addition, and a fantastic one at that).

I embedded the slide deck into a blog post on the private blog, and used multiple categories on the blog post to flag the conference track (general, advanced, executive or student), the conference theme (eg, productivity methodologies, groups and teams, mindmapping, etc.), and the status of the slide deck (draft for review, or final ready to go). For example, the slide deck on how to be productive with email was flagged as “advanced track, executive track, productive email, draft for review”.

I sent out the address of the Planning Beyond Planning private blog, along with the user name and password, to the advisors, and asked them to review whatever they had interest in the moment for reviewing. For example, they could click on the “groups and teams” category in the category cloud, and see the slide decks that were available for review. They could quickly scan through the slides in the deck, thanks to the power of SlideShare, and then leave comments on the blog with recommended changes or additions. This also meant that subsequent reviewers could see the comments that others had made, and either weigh in with a “hear hear”, or give a counter perspective.

When a slide deck was presented by Eric at the conference, I updated the private blog to signal that we didn’t need any further comments–the window of opportunity had closed. This meant that I changed the status to “final ready to go”, and closed the comments on the blog post itself.

All in all, I think it worked really well, and I wouldn’t hesitate to follow this process again. And I would fully recommend that other conference advisors embrace a similar approach. Many thanks to SlideShare for the role that they played in making Eric’s conference a success!

And equally my thanks to the advisors that worked to make this such a success.
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We have noticed in the past few days that people are manipulating SlideShare’s popularity methods to get their presentations on the front page. Using IP logging and other methods we have found that people are creating accounts, and downloading presentations hundreds of times, favoriting them or making lots of comments in order to manipulate our popularity algorithms. We are updating our popularity algorithms to better respond to such activity. It will watch out for such spurious patterns of activity and take measures to make sure you are not taking unfair advantage of the system.

We understand when you ask a friend or two to favorite your presentation. Heck, who doesn’t. But we want every presentation on SlideShare to have a chance to get to the top. The best way to get to the top is to make great presentations that people love!

There is a nice write up about SlideCasting in the Content Wrangler, a enterprise & business focused news website. Titled “Webinar Software Under Attack: Google Docs and SlideShare Take Aim“, this is a feature article and talks about how “…both companies are providing consumers with alternatives to pricey webinar software…“. Read the article here.

Thanks Scott Abel for the thumbs up…glad you like our mashup format.

P.S. we are working to add a few punches to slidecasting in the coming weeks; our focus is on bringing down the entry barriers to creating slidecasts, which should help in large scale adoption.

The site has been having problems with uploading slideshows for some time, and we have taken it down while we look into it. Sorry about this. Hopefully we will be able to bring it back up very soon.

Update (12.15 PM PST): The site is back up. You might still have some problems with uploading private slideshows. But everything else should work fine. We are looking into the private document upload and will solve that hopefully soon. Please post messages to this thread if you continue having problems.

Sherman Hu (one of our users from Vancouver, BC) produces a podcast series called “Half Hour Huddle” and publishes them on his cool podcasting website, ShermanLive.com. His latest episode (a videocast) is about Slidecasting, its benefits and how he created one of his own for Halloween. Check it out here (also embedded below)

Sherman, thanks for this slick production… we’re glad you liked slidecasting.

So you have heard of Karaoke - when you sing along to the soundtrack of pop songs. The idea behind PowerPoint Karaoke is similar. Presenters present, but to other people’s slides. But it’s a little harder than karaoke, because the slides are randomly chosen! Go here for a great writeup of how to run your own ppt karaoke.

We have created a cool little toy for helping you use slideshows on SlideShare to run a ppt karaoke event. You enter a tag from slideshare. It grabs all creative-commons licensed slideshows for that tag. If the slideshows allow download of the original file, it shows that link. All you need are some volunteers for presenting.

The SlideShare Karaoke Randomizer is the first tool that uses our just-released API. We are open sourcing it so that you can use it as you like. Its available on our new API site SlideShareToys. And the code is available through Google code hosting. We will be adding other tools and toys using the SlideShare API. And if you are interested in using the SlideShare API, go ahead and sign up for an API key. If you build something with it, tell us and we will add a link to you!

The SlideShare Karaoke Randomizer will be used for the first time today at the Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco! We are told that pptkaraoke is more fun when there is beer involved. Or wine! We will be sure to report back with pictures.

Screenshots below