gantico.com/en

I just joined another social network that cached my attention thanks to my guru-colleague Marco Casario. SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web, and basically it’s like YouTube but with slides instead of video. Recently they added also a feature called Slidecast, which allows you to sync slides with an mp3, for example your comment.

Nicely, they don’t force you to register for getting started: you can view and upload slides immediately. With registration you get access to all the community features, like comments, favorites, contacts, groups, messages, etc. Once joined the community you can set-up your personal slidespace, this is mine:
www.slideshare.net/gantico

Remember that you are given a perma-url based on the name of the file that you upload. It might have been nice if this was notified on the upload page, since there is no way to edit the perma-url at a second time. For the above presentation I got this never-ending string: www.slideshare.net/gantico/adobe-max2007-g-antico-advanced-video-encoding.
Strangely, if you use URL upload, they create a perma-url in a different and shorter way.

You can also embed their handy viewer in your site, like this:

For going in depth, and in majority of cases for being able to read something, you need to go full-screen, but this feature is not available for embedding in external sites. If you go to the presentation page on slideshare.net, you get all the functions and you can also find the link for downloading the original file (unless the author decided to hide it). Anyway, I think that it is great for previews: you can see immediately the first pages and have the other ones progressively downloaded while you read. To stress test this feature, I uploaded my whole graduation thesis: a 20Mb pdf of 250 pages, that can now be previewed in a cute “microfilm like experience”:

Slideshare Pros:
- the largest social network dedicated to presentations
- good community with interesting content
- quick start for uploading and quick registration process
- easy to use for both the author and the viewer
- link to original file and security controls
- great for previews of huge files
- it’s free.

Slideshare Cons:
- non web fonts are converted to Arial or Times
- text appears easily too small (unless you create a version optimized for slideshare)
- internal links in the presentation get lost with the conversion
- perma-urls not controllable and not editable
- views counter doesn’t filter yourself
- occasional downtimes

Conclusion:
Slideshare gives you an easy way to share, publicize and get your presentations commented. It allows you and your readers to preview quickly even long presentations. If you don’t mind for being still in beta, Give it a try!

Note:
Some or all points in Cons might be fixed before the end of the beta period, and it might be true also for the annoying “500 : Service unavailable”. In case you bounce in it when you are uploading with bulk or single upload, try the URL upload: it worked always in my tests.

Tip for Embedding slideshare in Wordpress

For embedding the viewer in your blog, you can use their shortcut code only if your blog is hosted on Wordpress.com. If you have a blog with WordPress platform installed on your hosting space, you might have already experienced some troubles with its “copy embed code”. A simple solution can be to install a specific plugin (or Added on 11 Feb 2008: A better SlideShare WordPress plugin).

The drawback is that if you install a plugin for each Flash application embedded in your blog you end up easily with dozens of plug-ins: for YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo, Myspace, Brightcove… I suggest to install just one plug-in for all your Flash usages: pb-embedFlash. It’s pre-configured for several services, but if one is not automatically recognized you can just copy and paste the url of the flash file + any requested parameter. For the last example, I just wrote this line of code:

[flash http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=thesis-160970-15829 w=640 h=546]