As many of you have reported, there was a pretty bad bug that got introduced in the code that we pushed out last night. It has to do with your login (due to a problem with cookies, sometimes you see yourself logged in as another user). We are disabling some of the functionality of the site while we take care of this.

Thanks to all of you for letting us know. Thanks for sending us screenshots, calling on the phone and the other avenues you used which helped us identify the cause of the bug.

Update 9 PM: its now fixed! We are back to our regular programming.

Update: 4:45am PDT Aaand, we’re back!

Update: 4:07am PDT This is taking a little longer than we thought but things are going smoothly. We should back shortly.

SlideShare will be going offline shortly for maintenance. We will be off-line from around 2:00-4:00am PDT.

Check back here or on our Twitter page for any status updates.

An exhilarating two weeks of Presentation Tennis ended yesterday. While it’s interesting that we had people from different countries across 3 continents collaborate to make the show, far more people from many, many more countries actually were a part of the event!

Thanks to everyone who took part! Take a look at the complete presentation below:

We’ve got a few more matches in the pipeline, but starting your own is as easy as creating a group on SlideShare. You could be a bunch of classmates in school or co-workers at a startup or just a rag-tag group of people across the world. Signup to SlideShare, create a new group for yourself and play some Presentation Tennis!

The collaborative design event, Presentation Tennis on SlideShare is in its last 3 days! If you’ve not seen this before, here’s your last chance to be a part of this this cool event! Check out how the show is shaping up below…

Join the Presentation Tennis group today to take a shot at adding to this brilliant slide deck!

A few companies have used SlideShare to put up shows about their products and services or about themselves. In many cases these are beginning to show up in web search results too, and are a valuable first point of contact with customers.

Considering that, we thought it would be a good idea to share this list of tips and best practices to market your company effectively using SlideShare.
Continue reading »

The deadline for submission of entries in the World’s Best Presentation Contest has been extended due to popular demand from the community. Instead of July 31st, you can now submit entries till the 7th of August. What’s more- the voting on the entries will continue for one more week (till 14th August) post last date for entry submission. This is to ensure that all entries get some time to gather votes.

Check out the top 10 decks in the contest at this stage… each one of them is a masterpiece. We are looking forward to more and more of these.

If you have not entered the contest, do that here. You could become a global presentation superhero!

Presentation Tennis, the collaborative presentation design event that is currently running on SlideShare is hotting up. It has entered the public phase when anybody can send it their entries to be considered for inclusion in the masterdeck.

Please join the Presentation Tennis group and play a part in crafting this awesome slide deck!

Amazon S3, the service that we use to host slideshows, images, and PowerPoint files, is almost completely down this morning. This is causing sections of slideshare.net to not work. For example, uploaded files are not converting, and the slideshow player that you use to view slideshows isn’t loading.

This is effecting many many sites (here’s a nice blog post from SmugMug, for example). I’m confident that they’ll restore service soon … it’s been about two hours so far. You can keep track of Amazon Web Services status here. I’ll post here again when service has been successfully restored.

Uploads are not being lost: they will be converted once the S3 problem has been resolved.

Update 7.30 PM PST:: Amazon S3 outage is over. SlideShare conversion and other parts of the services are back up now.