Slideshare

Slideshare is getting popular and is called the YouTube of PowerPoint. Slideshare is a great Web 2.0 tool that let users upload their presentations and share them online through a YouTube-like interface. It accepts PowerPoint (ppt & pps), PDF, & OpenOffice (odp) files with a maximum file size of 30 MB for each presentation file.

Slideshare is quite easy to use. You can upload your files after you login the Slideshare site. Alternatively, you can upload your presentations via URL upload, Email Upload, Upload Plugin (IE or Firefox). Once your presentation is uploaded to Slideshare, it is converted into a Flash format but it retains the hyperlinks that remain clickable even in the converted presentation.

Slideshare has several impressive features. Your presentation can be tagged, and comments left by viewers. Also, the slide transcripts are automatically generated from text elements of your individual slides as you play the presentation. In addition, each slide has its own URL for reference so you can give a URL for users to view a particular slide (i.e., slide 75) without going through your entire presentation. Furthermore, Slideshare has a Slidecasting capability that allows authors to synchronize slides with an audio file. Basically, Slidecasting is a slideshow plus podcasting. I think it is a great tool for conference presentations, musical slideshows, audio picture books, and etc.

After testing Slideshare for several weeks, I found Slideshare is clean, functional, easy to use, and fast. It supports various copyright claims, including creative commons. I think SlideShare is a cool place to share and discover presentations and slideshows. I consider using Slideshare to post conference presentations and for archiving purposes.