Sunday 11:45 PM PST: We are doing some important scheduled maintenance on our servers. The site is likely to be down for about an hour. Please bear with this.

Monday 00:45 AM PST: Server maintenance done and over. All systems back to normal … let us know if you are facing some problems.

Saturday 12:00 PM IST:

Its a cold wintery morning here and the Delhi HadoopHackday has just kicked off at the SlideShare office. This is a hacking festival and the participants include SlideShare engineers, interns doing projects with us, engineering students from Delhi’s engineering colleges, developers from other Delhi based software companies & startups. All teams get 24 hours to build something using distributed computing technologies like hadoop, mapreduce et al. And we have 10 teams participating.

Head to the wiki for more details.

One of the new mantras of social media is that you need to create content to connect with people. But what does that really mean? Should you start hiring bloggers? Or should you start creating videos? presentations? What type of content? This presentation from Barbra Gago below answers that question.

View more presentations from Barbra Gago.

It never ceases to amaze me the different ways people dream up of using SlideShare. This Bulgarian chess club has uploaded almost 40 presentations.

Each of the presentations depicts a set of chess moves. Browse through the one below.

We are pleased to announce an extension to our Slideshare for Business products. During the last three months, Slideshare users have been collecting leads through their presentations and documents with LeadShare — within the world’s largest professional sharing community.

But we heard from a many of you – that you want capture leads on your site / blog. Now with LeadShare for your Domain, you can generate unlimited leads by embedding the player in your website, without per-lead, per-form field costs. This is a great fit for:

* Blogs and Social Media campaigns that drive direct business results
* Upgrading your Microsites, Webinar archives and Landing Pages with LeadShare

For further information, see this presentation and contact us anytime.

Voting on the SlideShare Holiday Spirit Contest 2009 has ended on the 5th. The winners for the contest will be announced in a couple of days.

As always, before finalising the contest results, we will run our exhaustive check to detect any voting malpractises. This will involve anti spam algorithms and IP address checks to weed out possible rigging. Rest assured – the winners for the contest would be chosen in a fair manner and in sync with the contest rules.

SlideShare is organizing a Hadoop HackDay in our Delhi offices. We are really excited about the potential of Hadoop and are planning on using it extensively within SlideShare. But we don’t have much Hadoop experience, so we are organizing a hack day as a fun way to learn.

After organizing it, it occurred to us that others in the community might be interested. So if you want to hack on Hadoop stuff in a collaborative yet competitive environment (there are prizes for the best hack) are invited to attend. We’ll provide food, wifi, and some basic info about Amazon Elastic Map/Reduce, Pig, and Hive to help get you started.

The wiki page for event is hosted on barcamp.org. You can sign up on the wiki!

The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is now live. Check out the presentation below for a quick walk through the ruling presentation trends in 2009. The zeitgeist includes some data points about presentations, presentationware, presenters, usage trends etc that would be of interest to just about everyone. We have also sprinkled it with some fun facts & trivia. Our engineering team spent considerable time mining our database so as to come up with these numbers.

The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is being published for open and unrestrained usage. Feel free to quote these figures in your works, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes (we’d appreciate an attribution though).

The Zeitgeist also included community voting for the most inspiring presenters on SlideShare. This activity was ongoing for the last three weeks. The following SlideShare users have been nominated at the top of the charts. Congrats to them for achieving this feat (and also for inspiring the SlideShare community).

1. Christian Heilmann
2. John Resig
3. Dave McClure

Here’s wishing goodbye to 2009. And wishes for a smashing and successful 2010!

On behalf of the entire SlideShare team,

- Rashmi Sinha
Cofounder & CEO