Slideshare announces cool slide contest

Earlier this week Slideshare.net announced their "World's Best Presentation Contest." They are offering some pretty cool prizes such as a laptop computer for the 1st prize, some Xboxes, and some iPods. People can vote on their favorite slide decks; the top vote getters will receive iPods. The "World's Best Presentation" winners will be decided by Slideshare and the four judges, Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Jerry Weisman, and myself. Context is obviously important so take note of this section in the upload instructions:

While uploading the presentation file, you should tell us something about it in the description section. This will give the voters and judges some context as to your presentation. Specifically, tell us which of the below options describes how your presentation was or is meant to be used. "PowerPoint Deck as Leave Behind" OR "In Person Presentation Support" OR "Both" OR "Other".

I think "other" could mean the slideshare viewer itself. That is, you could rework your slides so that they are as clear and meaningful as possible on their own for online viewing and also take advantage of the slideshare features. I've talked a lot about slideumentation and the problem of trying to make visuals that are also meant to be handouts, this usually does not work very well. But you are free to be as creative as you can within the limitations of Slideshare, so why not experiment and see how powerful a message you can convey using the limited tools before you. I'm looking forward to seeing something great!

Comments

[xiaoxiaosun]

Garr,

I think it's a good idea for both slideshare and us.

I'm going to join this contest soon.:)

[Ashish]

Hi Garr,
I was finding it a little odd - that you were judging the world's best "presentation" contest on Slideshare - when you yourselves had used Slideshare's example to differentiate between slides and presentations. But here you are calling it a "slide contest" :)- The fine print does clears things up a bit. And irrespective - Slideshare is definitely a great product.

[Litan]

I agree with Ashish. without a presenter , a presentation would lack the grace . Maybe there could be an option of having a recorded audio clip uploaded alongwith the ppt.

[Garr Reynolds]

>>I was finding it a little odd - that you were judging the world's best "presentation" contest on Slideshare<<

Hi Ashish,

Yes, I was mildly critical in this post last December ( http://snipurl.com/1do2g ).I stand by my words, but please note that I also said at that time that it was early days and that Slideshare may develop into something quite remarkable over the years. I have a feeling that it will...and I hope it does, even if it isn't there yet. I have a lot of respect for the Slideshare team; they're smart people. I think it says a lot too that they asked me to judge even though they were aware of my earlier comments. I do not have any inside info, but I would bet that many other useful functions will be added in future.

How about if we looked at Slideshare as a kind of "third space." That is, it (your uploaded slides to Slideshare) are not the slides you used in the presentation, they are not the handout you distributed at the presentation, and instead your Slideshare slides try to tell the story in some sort of different way that combines images and text. Perhaps your Slideshare slides are a kind of commercial that draws people in and points them to your book or document (e.g., research paper) or live presentation coming up downtown or posted on Youtube, etc. Anyway, as I said, it's early days so let's see how people use it in future.

BTW, this is my account:

http://www.slideshare.net/garr

I just uploaded some slides by Kathy Sierra that she made available as a PDF (probably from Keynote). For those who have Keynote and not ppt, the PDF function is very cool.

[Ashish]

Hey Garr,

I have to absolutely agree with you that Slideshare has a great team - and in my understanding they are working on addressing the issues you had mentioned earlier.

The third space usage would be interesting - but I wonder how many would go through the effort of redoing their slides (which were supposed to support a talk) - for slide-only internet distribution. In Powerpoint - one can add text notes to each slide. I wonder if Slideshare includes these - that would be the quickest enabler of the third space - or perhaps a note addition feature on Slideshare itself.

Also, I tried uploading a .pdf - one issue is that if it is not a 4:3 aspect ratio (I uploaded a A4 document) it resizes it to fit the 4:3 space - and has no zoom function - (though one can use the Zoom In feature of the Flash player). http://www.slideshare.net/ashpod/creativity-the-discipline-of-innovation-by-peter-drucker

[Rich...!]

Aww c'mon Garr. It's thinking like this that promotes bad use of good tools.

Slides without speakers, why bother?

What a joke...!

[Jonathan Boutelle]

All,

Wow, lots of comments! Here's the way I think about slideshows.

They are NOT a replacement for a talk. At all. In fact, whenever I upload one of my own slideshows, I typically include my "speakers notes" as comments under each slide, which helps a lot (sometimes people even blog the comments, which is a very meta type of experience!)
http://tojou.blogspot.com/2007/03/good-discussion-of-flash-vs-ajax.html
).

You can think of slides as being a souvenir of a talk, or an advertisement for a talk. It's a visual artifact of an event, a digital artifact. A vacation snapshot doesn't replace a vacation. But that doesn't mean the social sharing of photos isn't worthwhile ... it just means that webapps for photosharing need to provide ways of wrapping the social context of the snapshot "around" the digital artifact. We try to do this with comments and tags ... but more is obviously on the way.

PowerPoint notes are not currently extracted into the page ... we're working on that, should be done soon.

Finally, thanks for judging this, Garr!

Jonathan Boutelle
CTO, SlideShare

[sadfasdf]

I use animation builds heavily (and hopefully effectively!). Will SlideShare support animation effects?

[Melvin Ram - Internet Marketing Specialist]

You can't possibly have a real "World's Best Presentation Contest" without the ability to have slide notes or audio that corresponds with each slide.

Don't get me wrong. I think slideshare has huge potential. Especially if they add audio + timing syncing.

But if you're going to be judging the "World's Best Presentation Contest", you gotta have a presentation to judge.

My slides support my presentations... but they're definitely not the presentation.

I'll enter the contest... and add a link to the PDF PowerPoint Notes View print out. I hope the judges (including yourself) will look at the PDF instead of the slideshare slides.

I recommend others do the same.

[Sacrum]

I not able to take part because I am living in Germany. This making me sad. I love to PowerPoints.

I send you warmness.

[Mrugesh]

Interview with Slideshare founder Jon Boutelle.Jon Boutelle was born in Boston and grew up on a farm in Massachusetts. A degree holder in Psychology from the Brown University, RI,he along with Rashmi Sinha and Amit Ranjan have been on the helm of SlideShare along with the rest of the team based in Delhi and the US.
Read more about it at http://www.loscreador.com/2007/06/16/interview-with-slideshare-founder-jon-boutelle/