Set Your Presentations Free!

How many presentations do you have locked up on a disk somewhere? Most of us never get around to doing much with our presentations other than emailing them to a few people or printing them out as handouts.

I was lucky enough to receive an invitation from Amit Ranjan, author of Webyantra, and the head of Uzanto’s New Delhi office to a wonderful service they were unveiling – SlideShare.

SlideShare isn’t a presentation creation tool. For presentation creation, take a look at Zoho, OpenOffice, Microsoft PowerPoint, or Apple Keynote. SlideShare allows people to upload their presentations (Microsoft PowerPoint and OpenOffice Presentation files are supported) and share them with the world, much like YouTube and Flickr have done for video and pictures, respectively.

The folks at Uzanto will be releasing the ability to share presentations only with specific groups or email addresses in the next month or so. At the moment, all presentations are publicly available to every one. SlideShare has the ability to display presentations on a blog or any other web page with a few lines of JavaScript, much like YouTube allows videos to be displayed on a blog. SlideShare allows you to have a permalink to a specific slide within a presentation or to the full presentation. SlideShare allows you to tag your presentation with keywords that you think are indicative of what the presentation is about. You can search other related presentations based on tags, as well as find the most popular presentations based on the most tagged keywords. I think SlideShare has a very clean and easy to use interface.

SlideShare Home Page

Presentation Upload Page

Tag Cloud

SlideShare is currently under an invitation-only beta. However, you can add your name and email address on their website to get on the next batch of invitations. I still have a few invitations left and if anyone is interested, feel free to leave me a comment and I can send you an invitation (first come, first served).