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

Last week we declared the results of the World’s Best Presentation Contest. The winner is Jeff Brenman who created a stylised version of “Shift Happens“. Jeff writes in his description that the original creator of the Shift Happens presentation is Karl Fisch. As Karl describes on his blog, he created the slideshow to start conversations with other teachers about the world their students are entering. It is a collection of facts and figures about America’s changing position in the world. Since Karl generously shared the original presentation under a Creative Commons license, there have been several remixes, many YouTube versions, and now Jeff’s SlideShare version.

Shift Happens has been viewed over 2 million times. For a presentation that was created by a school teacher for a faculty meeting, thats extraordinary impact. We at SlideShare would like to recognize Karl for creating this brilliant slideshow and sharing it in such a generous manner. As part of the World’s Best Presentation Contest, we are awarding him a special prize for “Most Impact”. It does not matter that the presentation was never entered into the contest (though I do hope that Karl will put it on SlideShare at some point :-)). Our goal in organizing the contest was to recognize great slideshows. And Karl’s definitely fits the bill.


When I contacted Karl about the prize, he suggested auctioning the prize (an iPod Nano) and donating the proceeds to a charity. Karl chose the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, a deserving organization that provides laptops for children in developing countries. We have put up the iPod for auction on eBay; here is the link for the auction. You can win an iPod and support a great cause.

Below is Karl’s slideshow about the auction. Happy bidding!

(We also request slideshare’s users to spread the word about the auction so that it gets a good response. Please blog it and let your friends/acquaintances know about it)

If you use Wordpress MU and want to easily embed slideshare slideshows into your posts, then use this plugin that from Elad. We recently released an embed code for wordpress.com which is already seeing a lot of use, and we are excited that WordPress MU users can do SlideShare embeds as well. Thanks Elad!
If you use a blogging platform that does not support SlideShare embeds, then let us know. We are making a special effort to work with all the blogging platforms to make sure that our users can embed slideshows into their blogs.

We have been received a few emails about Slideshare full screen not working. Now, thanks to one of our users we learnt that the latest Firefox Alpha release (Firefox 3) is blocking Slideshare full screen. If you are having problems viewing full screen, please check your popup blockers. If there is any other browser/toolbar that is blocking Slideshare full screen, please add a comment here - this will help out other users.

Thanks and keep on sharing!

We are keeping track of sites that are adding Slideshare support. SkillsFeed, an elearning platform just announced in their blog that they have better integration with YouTube, GoogleVideo and Slideshare. Their bookmarklet will grab the title, description and other fields from Slideshare.

BlogMemes which aggregates news across blogs in a number of languages added Slideshare support in French, English and Japanese versions. They wrote that Belgian, Chinese, Spanish and Portugese versions will soon follow. Here is a French example.
Thanks BlogMemes and SkillsFeed. If you have any news to share regarding Slideshare support, please post a note below.