SlideShare

SlideShare is a online, community-based presentation hosting service.

SlideShare was set up as an online community resource where users could upload and share presentations, enabling people to exchange ideas and communicate information. It currently allows you to upload presentations in the most common formats, such as Microsoft Powerpoint or OpenOffice. Once your presentations are uploaded, they are converted into Flash format, with the conversion process taking about 15 minutes to complete.The Flash format is ideal, as it means that the viewer need not have Powerpoint installed in order to view the presentaton. The presentation can be viewed in a small window or blown up into full screen without any loss in picture quality. Be warned though, any animation or sound effects you may have included in your presentation will be lost after the online conversion into Flash.

SlideShare's uniqueness is its concentration almost exclusively on uploading presentations. A now typical Web 2.0 are widgets, and SlideShare includes these too with regards to presentations. Once your presentation is uploaded and converted into Flash, you can embed it in your site or blog as a Flash object. This is a particularly handy feature.There is also a community aspect to SlideShare, where users can add each other as friends and restrict certain presentations to be viewed only by those people in their contacts list. While this community aspect might be overkill for a site the size of SlideShare, the restricted viewing option may have some merit in a business environment. Colleagues from a company could set up accounts and share presentations through their contact list.

SlideShare has a very clean site, with simple, light colors and unintrusive advertising. The navigation options are clearly placed in the top-left corner of the screen. The screen space is well used, which means that things aren't squashed together too much. Unfortunately though, the pages can take some time to load, so there is obviously a bandwidth problem that needs to be addressed.

The registration asks for minimal information. You will need to confirm your e-mail address with Slideshare, but you can do this at your convenience, seeing as you are allowed to utilize the site fully before your e-mail is confirmed. As with other site functions, the site was quite slow to respond during the registration process.

SlideShare is a free service.

SlideShare is a useful service if you have many presentations that you need to upload and store in one place. The ability to convert to the Flash format is useful when you want people without presentation software to be able to view your work. Embedding your presentations in your blog or site is also a very useful feature. The one thing letting this site down, however, is its sluggishness.

http://www.slideshare.net/