Not only will millions of SlideShare uploads embedded across the Web now render effortlessly on iPhones and iPads, but the company also launched a new mobile site that renders nicely on smartphones and tablets as well. The upgrade should also make the site and its embeds load faster, since they don't rely on clunky Flash plugins and content to render.

In the presentation-sharing space, SlideShare's closest competitor is probably Scribd, which has its own native iOS app called Float rather than a mobile-friendly Web app. Their website renders on the iPad, but tapping on a presentation results in a prompt to download a PDF rather than displaying it natively in the browser.

The change has the added advantage of allowing SlideShare to sell premium subscriptions to its service without having to pay 30% of that revenue to Apple.

Lanyrd has been described as a "Wikipedia for conferences," because it aggregates digital content from conferences - such as slideshows and videos. It's also a social network of sorts for conference attendees and enables non-attendees to track events virtually. Lanyrd celebrated its first anniversary last week, according to a blog post by co-founder Natalie Downe. Let's check out how Lanyrd has developed over the past year and why you should use this excellent service.

According to a blog post last month, Lanyrd now has 2,500 videos and 3,000 slide decks from events all around the world.

Lanyrd has continued to iterate on features. For example, it recently added a "super coverage widget," which highlights recently added coverage on an event.

Like many of the best web services these days, Lanyrd taps into and supports a variety of third party applications. SlideShare, YouTube and Scribd are just a few of those. In particular, Lanyrd uses Twitter as its core identity system. As Wade Roush from Xconomy described it in an excellent company profile:

"If you're creating an event listing on Lanyrd, you add speakers according to their Twitter handles, and if you're a user searching Lanyrd, the first events you see are those that the people you follow on Twitter are speaking at or attending."

Lanyrd was created by married couple Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, who are based in the UK. It was nurtured in the popular Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator. This is an inspiring story of two makers who have created a unique service packed with useful data. I recommend you check it out.

Meanwhile I'm off to explore some slideshows and videos from the August conference OggCamp 11...

"It's complete peace of mind for companies and for me," Sundar says, "because I know that everything that I share is compliant."

Earnings announcements online tend to be fairly closed affairs, even though they're technically public. They often require strange plug-ins and cumbersome log-ins, which add enough barriers to entry to exclude most informal participants. By live-tweeting the call and offering the slides for download, LinkedIn made its earnings call a more social, shareable experience.

Other companies using SlideShare to feature embeddable presentations include Dell, Amgen, and Pfizer.

Check out Mario's blog post about making the earnings announcement work for the social Web.

The feature is free and ad supported for basic users - SlideShare says it now sees an amazing 45 million unique visitors each month. Premium users who pay $19 per month have ads removed and can password protect the presentations. I just tested it for 30 minutes with between 30 and 40 people, viewing from all around the world. The verdict? Video quality could be a little higher (that might be my connection) but overall an excellent experience.

As part of the launch of the new feature, the company has lined up 20 well-known tech industry presenters who will be giving deck 'n' vid chats throughout the rest of the week.

SlideShare says it has developed the ability to record videos for replay alongside presentations, but will release that feature at a later date. Two way video communication is also in the works, but latency is far less an issue when it's one person speaking to many. More advanced ZipCast-specific analytics may be forthcoming, but hair and make-up as a service isn't anything to hold your breath for.

The video transmission is performed in part with HTML5 web sockets. Slideshare is using video chat API OpenTok and London-based PusherApp. The resulting display is in Adobe Flash. SlideShare's Ross Mayfield says more HTML5 is on the way, too.

Will I use ZipCast in the future? I'd sure like to. I'd like to use it regularly, it's really fast, easy, effective, compelling and fun to use. The fact that it was able to handle 40 viewers at once made me happy, too. Good job, SlideShare.

Scribd this morning posted a series of year-end Top 10 lists, offering a good view of some of the most interesting and widely-read primary documents on the web this year. As dry stuff goes, this is really interesting. We've embedded those lists below. Keep in mind the company's recent partnership with rich-media lookup service Apture and these docs become not just popular, but also full of multimedia on demand. How many of these hot docs have you read this year?

The lowest tier, "Silver" is aimed at business professionals and offers tracking analytics, ad removal and 30 lead captures a month for $19. "Gold" subscribers will receive 70 captures as well as the ability to custom brand their channel home for $49. And finally for $249, "Platinum" enterprise subscribers can gain access to an unlimited number of lead captures, and have the added control functionality within their channel to moderate things like comments and transcripts.

Previously, SlideShare users could pay to use the site's lead capture functionality, but only on a per lead basis. SlideShare had success on this micropayment model, but the desire to add more PRO features made the decision to go freemium an obvious one for the company.

The company is thinking about the future, SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha told ReadWriteWeb.

"It allows us to keep building our community with a compelling free offering, and to layer on advanced functionality that helps businesses and professionals get the most out of SlideShare," said Sinha.


The features have been privately tested in beta with 125 companies for roughly a month and a half, and many large brands are making great use of the features. Dell, Microsoft, Cisco and Pfizer are among some of the early adopters, and Sinha says many of these companies have already started using the service more because of it.

Adding video feels like a natural move for SlideShare. After all, more and more business content is already moving towards video and adding video adds an extra dimension to a presentation that a basic set of PowerPoint slides simply can't convey. As SlideShare's CEO Ramshi Sinha told us earlier this week, the company is mostly targeting marketers, teachers, doctors and other professionals with this new service. Currently, there are only a handful of dedicated video sharing services for professionals and platforms like YouTube don't really lend themselves for targeting the audience that many of SlideShare's users are trying to reach.

The video pages look almost exactly like regular SlideShare pages. The only real difference is that these pages now display a video instead of basic PowerPoint or Keynote slides. SlideShare uses can embed these videos on their own sites.

The closest competitor to SlideShare's new offering is probably BrainShark's free MyBrainshark service, which also allows professionals to sell their presentations. SlideShare's big advantage, however, is that is already has a large user base. Indeed, as Sinha told us today, the service now reaches close to 30 million unique visitors per month (including sites that embed SlideShare content).

Upload Limit: 500 Megabytes per Video

For now, SlideShare is officially calling this new video service a beta product. The company plans to gather feedback over the next two to three month and then iterate on the current version. The upload limit is currently 500 megabytes and uses can upload up to 5 videos per month.

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.

That grand prize winner was titled Healthcare Napkins All and was created by visual communication specialist Dan Roam and Dr. Tony Jones. You may or may not agree with the political perspective of this 51-slide presentation, but it's an undeniably impressive way to deliver information.

The winning presentation has been viewed more than 100,000 times and has been embedded on over 300 other websites. Additional winners were announced in 5 categories, ranging from technology to business to creative/offbeat. Winners were picked by a judging panel made up of Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, and David Armano, founding member of Dachis group.

SlideShare is a site that has seen surprising growth in just a few short years. Presentation decks may be terribly unsexy but the utility of a good one is clear. Traffic analysts Compete.com report that the SlideShare website saw 1.2 million unique visitors in August. The site fell victim to a malware distribution scam last month but remains one of the least hyped yet most appreciated social media services launched in the last five years.

Focus on Narration

As Brainshark's CEO Joe Gustafson and David Klein, the company's product director, pointed out when we talked to them last week, today's presentations at conferences or business meetings either include too much information per slide or consist of nothing more than just a few words and images per slide. While it is great that a lot of speakers make their presentations available after a public talk, most of these slides mean very little without the narration of the presenter. By giving presenters a wide range of options to add narration to their slides and to add videos and other documents, myBrainshark hopes to bring this context back to these disembodied presentations.

In comparison with Slideshare, myBrainshark is more flexible when it comes to how a presentation can be organized. Inside your presentation, you can easily switch back and forth between documents (Brainshark supports Office 2003 and 2007) and videos, for example. A Brainshark presentation doesn't even have to include a PowerPoint file - you can also use the service to voice-annotate a whitepaper, for example, or to narrate that exciting Excel spreadsheet you worked on all weekend long.

Focus on Professionals

While the company is mostly targeting business users - something that's clearly in Brainshark's DNA - users can also easily create a photo slideshow with the service. While Brainshark is marketing this feature as an opportunity for real-estate agents to showcase their offerings, nobody is going to stop you from putting up a narrated slideshow of your latest family picnic, either.

Selling Presentations

MyBrainshark also gives professionals the ability to sell their presentations. While anybody can register for a free account, Brainshark will give professionals the opportunity to go through a vetting process and then sell their presentations on the site. One example currently available on the service is a presentation about sexual harassment prevention for managers, which is selling for $15. These professionals (Brainshark calls them 'Learning Providers') can set their own prices for these presentations.

Verdict

Overall, the fact that Brainshark has been in this business for 10 years clearly shows in the product, which is very polished. Even though it only offers a subset of the features available in Brainshark's enterprise product, myBrainshark still offers more features and flexibility than most other online presentation services.

According to ESET's report, the attackers created slide decks which would contain a link to a malware-laden website and would then lure unsuspecting victims to Slideshare using traditional social engineering tactics. The presentations themselves should have raised a red flag for careful users, we think, but we have no way of knowing how successful they were at this time.

One of the presentations found included just one slide with a single link. The slideshow was purportedly offering a cracked download of ESET's own NOD32 scanner, an antivirus software program. To lend credibility to the download, the attackers added in the SourceForge logo (as if the open-source application directory SourceForge was a place to find cracked warez!) Of course, when the user clicked the link, they wouldn't end up on SourceForge, but on a spoofed site that looked very similar. A window would then pop up prompting the user to download a .EXE file. Since the user already thought they were accessing a link for a software installation program, they would click the link and let their computer be infected with the malware.

Of course you may scoff at these victims since they were trying to get "something for nothing" - in this case, a free anti-virus program when really they were being given a free virus instead. However, while you may not have fallen for this particular scam, it's only one example of how the SlideShare platform could be used for nefarious purposes such as this. It's not far-fetched to imagine that in the future attackers could create even harder-to-detect malware-infused slideshows. We foresee them copying a legitimate slideshow from the site and then including an extra page with their malicious link. News like this is all the more reason to run a good anti-virus program on your PC.

SlideShare Responds Quickly

In SlideShare's defense, they took action quickly against this threat. As soon as it was brought to their attention by way of the ESET blog post, SlideShare CoFounder Amit Ranjan responded in the comments saying:

"I just wanted to let readers know that the offending user account has been removed. Thanks a ton for bringing this to our notice. Spam slideshows are a problem for us. And as this example shows, they can be turned malicious as well. In case anyone comes across any other user account from where this is happening, please email us, and we shall take immediate action. As a company we are committed to stop all such malpractices."

However, the rogue account which had been used to spread the malware had joined the SlideShare community in June 2009 and had uploaded as many as 2473 presentations before they were banned this week.

Social Sites Need to Think About Security

The more popular the site becomes, the more likely it will be used to spread malware, so perhaps SlideShare should be somewhat flattered that they've reached this level of notoriety. They've now joined the ranks of many other social networking sites who have seen regular malware threats invade their platforms. Facebook, for instance, has come under attack multiple times in the past, the most memorable of which was the Koobface trojan which leaped outside of Facebook to spread to other social networking sites. It continues to evolve, even infecting Twitter as recently as last month. But Facebook isn't the only example by any means of social sites under attack. Unfortunately, any website or social community where users are allowed to post content could become victim to threats such as this.

What's odd, though, is how many sites seem to think of security as an afterthought. Case in point, it was only on Monday of this week that we saw Twitter start filtering malicious links from being posted. These are the sort of features that really should have been included from the get-go. In SlideShare's case, they may eventually have to go the same route as Twitter and partner with a malware-scanning service like Google's Safe Browsing API to make sure their hosted content isn't dangerous to their users. In fact, they may want to start looking into that right now.

SlideShare, the largest presentation-sharing community on the Web, has continued to introduce functionality that helps bring presentations to life. But they've never allowed a presenter to embed themselves. Until now. Introducing YouTube embedding in SlideShare.

Voiceover helps, but seeing the presenter is the key. When we watch presentations, we rarely stare at the slides nonstop. Instead, we oscillate between slides and presenter. Using YouTube in combination with SlideShare, one could easily recreate that back-and-forth between slides and the presenter, adding a more realistic feel to "canned" presentations online. Or, if the presentation was recorded, the presenter could add the video of the presentation to the end of the slides - letting users see the content and then see the presenter interacting with it.

To try the feature for yourself, visit SlideShare and upload your presentation as you would normally. While you're waiting for the upload to finish, head over to YouTube and grab the URLs for the videos you'd like to use. Once the upload completes, choose "Edit" and then click on the YouTube tab.

The embedding feature is still in beta, so you may encounter some issues. I tried a couple of different presentation and I didn't have any problems. In fact, I threw the following presentation together in a couple of seconds to give you an example:

In reality, the video encoding will take far longer, so that is going to be the biggest hurdle. But if your content already exists on YouTube, you're ready to go right now. Don't use YouTube? SlideShare has plans to add other players if the feature proves popular.

Adding videos to presentations promises to add a great deal of depth to otherwise static online presentations - and more personality than a voiceover can provide. Couple your new dynamic presentations with SlideShare's ability to embed presentations in LinkedIn and you could be on a speaking junket before you know it.

Now, it can be. Today, SlideShare is introducing the "SlideShare Ribbon" an add-in that makes the sharing and social features of SlideShare accessible without even leaving PowerPoint.

Using the SlideShare Ribbon, users gain the ability to share presentations from within PowerPoint, update existing presentations with new content, search existing SlideShare presentations for examples, download SlideShare content for remixing, and view presentations from contacts and groups. User can also check their SlideShare statistics from within PowerPoint.

In short, SlideShare makes PowerPoint social.

That's what makes this release so interesting. SlideShare has taken the opportunity to move beyond browser development - the traditional home of social features - to work on a different piece of desktop software. And in PowerPoint, SlideShare has chosen an app that, by and large, has not been seen as a venue for social behavior, at all.

The idea of using PowerPoint to access Web resources isn't earth shattering. Microsoft has provided the ability to dynamically download PowerPoint clip art for quite some time. But that has always been within the realm of delivering Microsoft content to the user. This is the first time that those types of Web-based interactions have taken on more of a social-networking context - by delivering and sharing content from a variety of users. And that suddenly casts all desktop software in a new light - no matter how "unsocial" a particular app may seem.

No doubt this is just the first of many such add-ins that will imbue our most used applications with social features. And that will make even the most tedious of applications increasingly valuable to us.

To install the SlideShare Ribbon, you'll need to PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Is a new upload format terribly newsworthy? Not exactly. But there are a couple of interesting tangents to this news that make it worth a mention.

First, this announcement hints at the makeup of the SlideShare user base. I would have assumed that the bulk of people using the service were Microsoft PowerPoint types, but that might have been an incorrect assumption. SlideShare says that native Keynote uploads have been one of the "most requested features from our users." Or perhaps it's just that PowerPoint users are either completely satisfied with the service or unwilling to share their presentations publicly?

Second, this leads me to question whether PowerPoint remains the unassailable presentation format it was always assumed to be. Could it be that the rise of Keynote, Google Docs Presentations, OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat PDF and other presentation formats are beginning to put dents in the Microsoft's install base? Or do Keynote users just have more aesthetically pleasing presentations which they want to share?

Third (and honestly the most interesting point), by enabling native Keynote uploads, SlideShare will finally give us a glimpse into the metrics that can answer all of these questions. Remember when Flickr launched its Camera Finder, using the metadata from photos to give us a view into the models of cameras that Flickr uploaders were using? It doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to see SlideShare pursuing a similar offering.

To date, Keynote users who wanted to share their presentations via SlideShare have been forced to upload presentations as PDFs. That has made it difficult to tell who is using what software to develop their presentations - beyond visual clues. With the native Keynote upload, however, SlideShare will begin capturing real PowerPoint vs. Keynote metrics. And that may illuminate some very interesting trends - as well as answers to some of the questions above.

Do people really care what presentation software people use? Maybe not. But they care what Web browsers, operating systems, applications, and mobile handsets people use. And soon, SlideShare could be providing us with yet another data point that helps round out our understanding of actual user metrics - as opposed to just assumptions. Without a doubt, that information is going to be valuable to someone.

Firstly Compete's data shows that Slideshare has been ramping up:

I have to note though that Scribd, which allows you to upload any type of document (not just presentations), is also ramping up according to Compete. The following chart shows that Scribd is far more popular than Slideshare:

Nevertheless there's no doubt that Slideshare is growing. I would guess that it is the leading pure play online presentations app - but please leave a comment if you think otherwise.

What impresses me about Slideshare is that it has a thriving community. I uploaded my Media08 presentation, Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, to Slideshare (link) a couple of weeks ago and within days it had thousands of views and some comments. As of today it has been favorited 49 times and embedded (in other blogs etc) 67 times. I also noticed many people friending me via Slideshare. This tells me the community at Slideshare is vibrant and they enjoy viewing and discussing slideshows.

Slideshare has some neat features: tags, ability to post to various sites such as Facebook and Blogger.com, good privacy options, transcription of the slideshows, widgets, and more.

The Groups feature is something that could be utilised by a lot of people. For example the XMediaLab group nicely rounds up all of the presentations from the recent Media08 event that I presented at. So if you weren't in Sydney to attend that event, you can at least browse through all of the presentations (and if new media is your thing, it's well worth your time!).

Individuals can also make use of Slideshare to store all of their public presentations - check out Dave McClure's large collection for example.

If you needed any more proof that Slideshare rocks, they also have an API - check out SlideShare Karaoke, which ProgrammeableWeb describes as "a PowerPoint mixer to select a PowerPoint presentation on the fly from SlideShare".

Slideshare isn't perfect, e.g. it currently doesn't convert from Mac Keynote. It may not even have the biggest store of online slideshows - Google, Zoho, Scribd are just a few competitors that potentially have more. Also let's not forget (as I almost did!) that Slideshare is a slideshow sharing app, not a creation one like many of the others. But even given all of that, Slideshare looks to have tipped amongst the hip web 2.0 crowd; and more importantly it has built up its own community of presentation-lovers.

What app(s) do you use for online presentations?