The SF Javascript meetup is a brand-new institution ... only on it's second meeting. But BOY has it started with a bang! Last time Douglas freakin' Crockford (inventor of json and jslint) presented!

Now it's time for the second meeting, and I'm proud to say that SlideShare will be hosting the event.

If you are a Javascript nerd and based in SF, then you should totally go to this, since the last one was totally awesome. But sign up fast ... it was posted today and is already over half full.

The techcrunch article lays out the details. We are really happy with how things worked out! Many thanks to everybody out there who played a part in making it happen.

We could have made a press release, of course, but press releases are kinda boring. So we made a meet henry style presentation instead.

| View | Upload your own

"Meet Henry" is a presentation style that evolved on slideshare, and is a great way to describe the value of any good or service (through a simple, predictable narrative arc). In our case, we used Dave McClure (who's an angel AND an advisor) as our "Henry".

We're really grateful to our community for taking us this far. We love you guys and all the cool stuff you do, and can't wait to see what you upload next! We promise to work really hard to make the SlideShare experience as useful and pleasurable as possible.

As I wrote in my last post, we've been going through the process of adding a content delivery network (PantherExpress) to SlideShare. Since there isn't a lot of information on the net about how to use a CDN to accelerate content that is hosted on S3, I thought I'd publish it here.

The way you integrate with any CDN is pretty much the same.
1) Create a subdomain (e.g. static.slideshare.net) for your domain.
2) Point that subdomain to your CDN (e.g. 132.pantherexpress.com) using a CNAME entry in your DNS.
3) Configure the CDN to know that the "origin server" they should use is your amazon S3 bucket.
4) When the CDN gets a live request for a piece of content, it serves the content if it has it in it's cache. Otherwise, it fetches the content from the origin server and then serves it.

This is great if you're starting out. But what if you've already launched? You NEED to be able to try out your CDN integration, and then quickly back it out if it isn't working. There's two ways to go here.

1) If you've thought ahead, you've named your s3 bucket after your subdomain (e.g. static.slideshare.net) then you can point your CNAME entry to to bucket. To switch to your CDN, change the CNAME entry. If there're a problem, switch back. The switch will take however long your "time to live" is set to in DNS.

2) OTOH, you probably WEREN'T forward thinking enough to name your s3 bucket after your subdomain. In this case (the normal case), you have to make sure your webapp is written so that you can quickly change the location where it expects to find external content. We didn't do that (we had hard-coded the s3 bucket url into the code), so we had to externalize that into a property file that could be easily edited.

So far we've accelerated our thumbnails, our javascript / css / navigation images, and all our content players. Still to come is the actual content (the slides themselves). Measured page load time for page loads on media-heavy pages have dropped from 10 seconds to 4 seconds. I'm hopeful that we can use the CDN to accelerate our slides as well.

One thing I've been working on in the last month is accelerating the serving of SlideShare content using a "content delivery network" (or CDN). You use a CDN so your content can be cached in RAM, in a place that is geographically near your customers, instead of on disk, in a place that is far away from your customer. This makes a BIG difference in terms of page load time. There isn't much on the net about hooking a CDN up to Amazon S3, so here's what I learned:

Frankly, the process of shopping for a CDN vendor is *really* annoying, especially for someone who has become used to buying these cloud-based services like S3 that are priced openly and on the basis of usage. The process is very "enterprise procurement": lots of high-pressure salesmen trying to get you to sign two-year contracts, and with no price transparency. One way to win is to get them to bid against each other. But the whole thing feels like an unnecessary amount of work.

Fortunately, we found a company that had transparent pricing that seemed fair to us, and that wasn't about locking us into a long-term contract: PantherExpress! Their pricing is standardized, is per-gigabyte, and gets cheaper the more you use it. Given that Amazon doesn't provide a CDN, this is the next best thing for serving up content fast. It costs $.28/GB for the first 8 TB/month, $.24/GB for the next 8 TB, and so on. More expensive by Amazon, but a decent price for global content delivery.

Hooking PantherExpress up to S3 was pretty easy, and I imagine the same procedure would work with other CDNs. I'll cover that in my next post.

I'm really pleased to announce a new member of the SlideShare advisory board. Edward Tufte, author of such seminal works as "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", has agreed to join the SlideShare team.

Tufte's work on presentation design is obviously especially relevant to us. His critique of current approaches to presentations (The cognitive style of PowerPoint) was a major driver of the new styles of presentation that have cropped up in the last few years.

This will result in some changes to the SlideShare experience as you currently know it. Most importantly, we're implementing some filters that will block the most egregious examples of PowerPoint abuse from our system. You can read the official announcement for the whole story.

Sergey Chernyshev just released a much-needed piece of code last week: an extension that makes it easy to embed slideshare slideshows into MediaWiki, the open-source wiki software that powers wikipedia.

This is pretty huge: for an organization trying to build a knowledge repository, easy integration between wiki content and social document sharing is a really important. A good example of how this can be used can be found on Sergey's site TechPresentations.org , which archives presentations from all tech conferences worldwide.

A company that wanted to run a private mediawiki could even upload slideshows to slideshare, not share them publicly, and embed them into their corporate wiki. This would provide a wiki that supported embedded office documents, which would be a killer knowledge-management tool.

Just like Chris Hellman's slidehare ego widget, this mashup does it's work without using our API. I'm reminded that RSS and embed codes are powerful integration points with any system. It's easy to forget that a lot of the time, a formal REST API isn't even necessary in order to build a mashup!

Hey peeps! We're having some difficult-to-troubleshoot problems with our server cluster right now. The primary problem seems to be with file uploads: I've taken the site down into maintenance mode while we scramble to fix this. Will keep y'all updated via this blog, blog.slideshare.net, getsatisfaction.com, email, and carrier pigeon as we work to fix this.

Chris Heilman published an article where he described how to make a slideshow widget that has ALL your slideshows from slideshare in it. The article was recently profiled in the Ajaxian.

The result looks totally bad-ass. In fact, we've been working on a similar widget, but this one totally blows ours out of the water. The only downside is that his current solution required server-side scripting (with php). We'll definitely take inspiration from this design and try to put something out in the near future that does something like this from a simple embed.

It's interesting that Chris chose NOT to use our APIs for doing this, relying instead on our RSS feeds and embed codes to get the information he needed. Chris writes:

I had a look at the API of slideshare but I am always a bit bored with having to go through a developer ID and then do everything on the server. That’s why I put on my “ethical hacker” hat and took a look at the RSS feed of my slides and found everything I need there!

Sounds like making our read-only API calls usable without a login would have helped here. What else would make our API more accessible or useful to developers?

SlideShare is one year old today. We're celebrating in typical web fashion: messing with our logo.

I'm really proud of everything our team has been able to accomplish over the last year, and incredibly grateful to all our users for their enthusiastic support. We never expected it to get this big, this fast, and we're now solving all kinds of cool scaling issues thanks to the traffic we're getting, even as we work on adding super-duper new features.

Thanks to everybody who helped us get here (you know who you are ;->).

I've finally put together a slidecast on how to create a slidecast (very meta). It's short (only 3 min), but it shows off the basics of how to use slideshare to make web multimedia using only a ppt file and an mp3.

It was interesting what I learned making this slideshow. The media form is really spare compared to video. For instructional content this is actually great, since you can direct the viewer's attention to exactly the part of the screen that you want them to focus on. It reminds me of the way technical manuals always have line drawings instead of color photographs: sometimes lo-fi is BETTER if it lets you draw attention to the right information.

Also, I had pre-recorded the mp3, but I found I had forgotten to say some stuff that was really important (for example, the keyboard shortcuts for editing the beginning point of a slide, and the url of archive.org). I was able to easily add slides that had that information. PPT is a lot easier to edit than an audio file, so you can easily fill in the gaps from an audio presentation with text.

I also discovered one bug: Camtasia (which I used to create the mp3) generates mp3 files that claim to have a bit rate of 0 kbps. While the files are actually fine, the file attribute is set incorrectly, and so it was not playable by the flash player. Simply opening the mp3 file in audacity, and then exporting it again fixed the problem. Audacity is free and open source, and is a great audio recording / editing package. I'll update our faq with this info (Update: Beth Kantor gets credit for first reporting this bug. Thanks Beth!)

The flash application for synchronizing the mp3 to the slideshow was really hard to code: I'd love feedback on it and how we could make it better. Doug Kay (from ITConversations) seemed to like it:

They have an excellent editor, written in Flash, that allows you to set the slide-transition points relative to the audio file.

Someone else wrote (in a comment):
Wowzer! That’s very powerful. I especially love the fact that I can go forward and backward through the presentation, using the slides as a visual indication of where I am in the presentation.

Check it out: it's the original PowerPoint file that Colin Powell used for the 2003 UN meeting where he argued in favor of the invasion of Iraq.

As a historical document, it's quite interesting. It's remarkable how flimsy the evidence for war looks in retrospect. Remember the aluminum tubes? The "mobile weapons labs" that looked a lot like Winnebagos? The endless recordings of low-level Iraqi officials talking about hiding stuff? The satellite photos? It's all here. It's interesting how little emphasis was given to the human rights angle (only 1 out of 45 slides).

I hope that more "historical powerpoint" gets uploaded to SlideShare over time. These are important documents. And our tax dollars paid for their preperation, so they belong to us!

Last night I did my first eBay listing in a few years. I'd sworn off ebay since it's such a time-sink, but this was for a good cause: Karl Fisch wanted us to auction off the ipod nano he won in the Worlds Greatest Presentation contest on SlideShare last week. Proceeds go to an awesome organization, the one laptop per child foundation.

Happy bidding!

A few weeks ago, a really cool presentation ("Meet Henry") was uploaded to slideshare. It was a pitch for Ethos3 Communications, told through the introduction of two characters (Henry and Erica). Henry is the stereotyped MBA: Erica (the protagonist) kicks his ass because she uses Ethos Communication.

I don't even know what Ethos3 is, but the slides were really cool. They stood by themselves: they don't need a presenter to be effective. The presentation was so effective that Guy Kawasaki and the other celebrity judges on the "Worlds Best Presentation Contest" gave it 2nd prize.

The interesting thing is that the presentation seems to have spawned it's own genre. Soon after that presentation was uploaded to slideshare, Scott Gavin uploaded "Meet Charlie". Meet Charlie is a nice introduction to Enterprise Web 2.0, told in the same style as Meet Henry. In fact, Scott credited "Meet Henry" in the description.

Now there's a french translation of meet charlie, and meet josh, a pitch for Union College. These presentations are built for the web, not for live talks. They tell a story using simple graphics and words, and they're pretty effective. Neat!

We're super-happy to announce that Wordpress.com now supports slideshare embeds. This has been a feature that our uses have been requesting since we launched.

Since wordpress.com strips out embedded code by default, the way is works is you grab a special "wordpress short code" from slideshare. You paste that into your blog article, and the slideshow will appear.

They also added us to their "slideshows" link (which also has short codes for slide.com, rockyou, and splashcast).

Thanks wordpress.com!

The web 2.0 Expo group on slideshare already has some nice stuff in it.

Some highlights:
Casual privacy from kellan (at Yahoo!)
High performance web sites from Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer (also at Yahoo!).
Are agile projects doomed to half-baked design? from Alex Chaffee and Leslie Chicoine.
Usability testing in the wild from Andre Charland

Today we launched our first contest on SlideShare. Contests are the new hotness on the web nowadays … if bix is the American Idol of the web, you can think of this as being the American Idol of PowerPoint (yes, that is a weird idea!). Today youtube also launched a huge contest of their own, so it seems like the time is right for contests on the web.

The idea of an American Idol of PowerPoint may be funky, but the contest is serious. Every judge is a renowned presentation expert. Guy Kawasaki, for example, has serious rules about how long your powerpoint can be, and what should be on each slide of a pitch to potential investors. Garr Reynolds is the author of the amazing Presentation Zen blog, which was one of the first blogs I started reading about presentation design. Bert Decker is a top presentation coach who you’ve probably seen on TV (especially in election season, when he comments on the presidential debates for NBC's Today Show). And Jerry Weisman is silicon valley’s go-to guy for executives gearing up for the grueling presentation hell that is the pre-IPO “road-show”. Presentation rock stars, all of these guys.

The prizes are pretty rad too. An alienware Area 51 laptop (w/Vista), plus two Xbox 360s and a ton of games, were generously donated by Microsoft. Thanks Seattle people! And Garage Technology Ventures sponsored the contest, which was really cool of them.

Judges will determine the final winners, but there’s also a prize for the “people’s choice”. Anyone can vote for the winner of the people’s choice, and there are ipods for the top three winners in that category.

The contest design was a lot of fun. We tried to make the contest really social, so you can always see the avatars of “recent positive voters” next to a slideshow that is in a contest. Warning, this is addictive!

Anyway, go on and upload your presentations to slideshare if you want a bad-ass new AlienWare laptop. What are you waiting for?

We've been slowly adding more and more social features to slideshare over the last few months. You can now add slideshare members as friends, leave comments on their profile (we call that a "Ping"), or send private messages.

It's been cool to see how all of this plays out. Here's a nice article describing how Brian Kelly has been using slideshare to find like-minded slideshare members in his field. Excerpt below!

A few days ago I received an email alert which informed me that a number of the presentations had been added as a Favourite by a Slideshare user.

I can then follow their list of other favourites and the slides which they may have uploaded. And guess what: people who are interested in my slides on Web 2.0 are also interested in other slides on the same subject. So this 'social network' provides a form of resource discovery for me

When a user signs up for slideshare, they receive an confirmation email that they need to respond to in order to activate their account. Frankly, the confirmation rate isn't as high as we'd like (it's about 87% since the site launched).

Most of this is due to spam filtering or blocking by the various email providers. For example, my own email provider temporarily rejects emails, causing a 5-10 minute delay in the arrival of the email!

I did some analysis of the conversion rates of users with different kinds of email addresses, and came to some surprising conclusions. This chart sums it all up:

It's only a small mention, but it's nice to see that we're getting press coverage in the national press of India as well as in the US. I DO think the Hindu should consider hiring a better copy editor, however. ;->

We've been working on our own wordpress plugin, but apparently not fast enough! Today I found out that Koen and Microsklave have both released wordpress plugins for embedding slideshare slideshows into a wordpress blog.

To be clear, there is currently no problem embedding into a wordpress blog: these plugins simply make the syntax a little prettier (by accepting a permalink rather than an embed code as input). The cool thing will be if one of these (either our plugin or theirs, we don't care which) was deployed on wordpress.com. That way millions of wordpress.com users will be able to embed slideshows.

We're a bit embarrassed that the internet beat us to this task, but we're also psyched that people are passionate enough about slideshare to write code like this. Thanks guys!

In other digg-related slideshare news, Digg was down for nearly two hours today. While the site was down, they put up a page recommending other sites to visit. And slideshare was on the list! Techcrunch provided this snapshot.

Slideshare got it's first real digging yesterday. The results are very visible, since slideshare is a social system that tracks page views publicly.

As of this moment, Cats, a collection of funny cat photos put together by EGK, has had 59641 views. It has been up for three days, and has had almost 3 times as much traffic as it's closest competitor, Frases Navidenas.

This is clearly due to the fact that cats got dugg. I had no idea that diggers were into cat photos, but apparently they are!

I'm happy to report that our servers had no trouble at all handling the traffic. We're glad for the traffic and exposure to the digg audience.

However, it's interesting the distorting effects that one link can have on a social system like slideshare. Four weeks of our loyal users watching the driving in bolivia slideshow have been undone by a swarm of traffic from digg.

Digg is becoming powerful enough not only to drive lots of traffic to sites, but to drive up the rank of particular pieces of content within a given site. I wonder now whether the most popular videos on youtube are popular because of being dugg? With so many sites ranking stories, videos, or other content on the basis of views, digg leaves it's mark on the web every day by directing a river of traffic towards select pieces of content. Freaky!

Slideshare was reviewed in businessweek yesterday. You need a membership to view the site, so here's a snapshot for those that don't have a subscription.

Have I Got A PowerPoint For You

By Jena McGregor (Business Week)

Here's the snapshots from the party we had last Friday at the Uzanto office in Delhi. I had a really good time, and met a lot of cool people in the Delhi startup and usability scene. Thanks for coming, everyone!

At the "art of the start" conference last week, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch was interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about "How to Get on TechCrunch". Michael basically said that you shouldn't use words like "revolutionary" and "web 2.0" to describe your site: it's too generic and doesn't carry any information. He cited slideshare as an example of a good pitch (our pitch was "YouTube for Powerpoint"). Rashmi was called up onto the stage to talk about the "TechCrunch effect" and the effect it had on slideshare.

Here's the video of rashmi being interviewed. The funniest part is when Rashmi mentions that people upload sermons to slideshare. Guy responded in a deadpan voice "well, God does have 30% market share". Worth watching!

Indezine (a web magazine for presentation professionals) has just published an interview with me.

Here's an excerpt:

The most inspiring thing to me about SlideShare is the number of teachers that are using SlideShare to share lessons and lecture slides. I love the idea that we're helping teachers do the important work of educating the next generation!

Business 2.0 has published an interview with me answering some questions about Slideshare. My favorite quote:

What we're seeing, though, is that PowerPoint and other presentation formats provide the ability to create narratives and do user-generated multimedia that goes beyond traditional PowerPoint for a talk or business meeting. For example, lots of people are uploading photosets or stories or video game screen shots.

We just rolled out a whole bunch of new features on Slideshare. The writeup is here. The biggest new feature is that we now have a way to save your favorite slideshows, and optionally tag them.

Halloween fun on slideshare.

I'm with my team in New Delhi, working on a whole truckload of new features for slideshare. I just got here yesterday, and I'll be here for at least the next two weeks.

Anyone in Delhi who wants to meet up, give me a buzz! I'm especially interested in connecting with the Delhi Ruby/Rails community this trip. I'm also interviewing candidates for a few positions that we are hiring for (see this post for details).

Over the last few weeks, we've added a few servers to the slideshare cluster, and fixed a bunch of bugs. We're ready for our closeup! From now on, you can browse slideshare without a userid (you still need to have a login if you want to upload PowerPoint files or comment on a slideshow however).

We've also added a Digg This! button. The coolest part is that the thumbnails of the slideshows already show up on digg. How do they do that???

Lots of social features still to come... but the biggest feature by far is the wacky content that some of our community members upload. Check out this animated fight between shaquille oneil, bin ladin, and george bush!

We are amazed and thankful at the huge response we’ve gotten to SlideShare in just five days since launch, and need to hire developers and a sysadmin immediately to keep up with the enthusiasm. Positions available are for our team in New Delhi (the Uzanto team is a small, tightly-knit team of developers and designers in India & US).

We work with cutting edge technologies - Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services. We are looking for developers and a sys admins. Our setup consists of Ruby, Rails, MySQL, lighttpd/mongrel, Pound, FreeBSD, and Debian. We run our Rails apps on a 7-machine FreeBSD/Debian cluster (and Amazon S3).

Techcrunch broke the news this morning about slideshare.net, the new web app from Uzanto. Slideshare is a site for the social sharing of slideshows (PowerPoint and other types of presentations).

Anyone who wants an invite, sent me an email (jon AT uzanto DOT com) and I will hook you up! (Currently the site is invitation only: each account gets 10 invites to forward on to others). And you can read more of my writings about slideshare on the slideshare blog.

The cool thing is that you can embed slideshows into your blog, like this talk by my friend Ali, who is a teacher: