For now, SlideShare is only offering these new channels to larger businesses. This is clearly part of SlideShare's monetization strategy and fits in well with SlideShare's other business-oriented products like AdShare and LeadShare, both of which are part of SlideShare's strategy to position itself as a site where professionals can share their content and connect with potential customers.

According to Sinha, these custom channels - which include all of the standard social networking features of SlideShare - will allow businesses to create communities around their content and help these companies to engage their customers. Besides sharing slides, these companies will also be able to aggregate content from their blogs or their Twitter feeds on their SlideShare pages.

In addition to offering branded channels with company logos and a custom look and feel, SlideShare now also offers enterprises the ability to sponsor topical channels.

Sadly, though, it doesn't look like the company plans to give regular users the ability to create and curate their own channels anytime soon. Being able to curate topical channels would be a nice feature, but for now, if you want to do this, you will have to resort to embedding SlideShare files on your own site.

So what's this all about? It seems that, in the coming weeks, YouTube plans to launch a brand-new user interface for their Channels section and if you click the secret link, you can be a part of the group that helps test it and provide feedback.

Here's the message that displays:

The new Channels section lets you edit your Channel within your channel. Using buttons at the top of the screen, you can change "Settings," "Themes and Colors," and "Modules." Previously, this type of editing had to be done on a separate page. Also, an "edit" button appears within different sections of the page, letting you further customize those particular parts.

Here's what the current Channels section looks like:

Here's the new Channels beta:

YouTube has also set up a "secret" blog which they'll use to communicate with the beta testers. You can follow the blog here: http://youtube-channels-beta.blogspot.com. There, you can leave bug reports, requests, and other feedback in the comments section.