SlideShare is still in beta but it looks cool – and very useful. Search on corporate blogging, for example, and you’ll come up with dozens of recent presentations you can look through for inspiration.
As on YouTube, you can see how many times each presentation has been viewed, if anyone has left comments, what tags (keywords) have been used, pointers to related presentations, what the URL for the slide is, the code to “embed” the presentation on your site or blog and more.
There’s also a Popular category (Halloween 2006, What Women Expect From Men, etc.). And of course a SlideShare blog. (Yes that’s a Halloween bottom, at left. Very un-PC.)
The file formats are limited thus far to PowerPoint and OpenOffice. Darn… and just when I’m getting addicted to Keynote for the Mac. BTW, you can’t really “copy” graphics or images out of the presentations. But, ahem, if you use a tool like Snapz Pro (to which I’m also now addicted), you, er, can.
Yet another example of what the “social” in social networking and social media means and how powerful it is.
Nirvana for conference organizers
Of course one of the coolest uses for SlideShare is to direct your conference attendees to one link where all your presenters have uploaded their slides. Just as with Flickr photos, you tell your presenters to tag their decks with a specific keyword. Here’s an example: Dreamforce06 (a Salesforce.com conference).