I discovered SlideShare from a post on Garr Reynolds’ blog about the World’s Best Presentation Contest he’s judging in April. SlideShare is like YouTube, but for slideware presentations, and allows you to upload up to 30MB files (it accepts PowerPoint directly, but I had to export my Keynote files to PDF to upload them). You can favorite presentations and tag them, zing them (SlideShare’s term for voting Digg-style), and leave comments a presentation’s author. You can also embed a presentation in a blog post:

At the bottom of the page for the presentation I uploaded, SlideShare has a Slideshow transcript that contains the text extracted from each slide. I’m still thinking of how this might be used, and it’s an interesting idea.

The World’s Best Presentation Contest. This looks like a brilliant marketing idea on SlideShare’s part – it got me to try the service by uploading a presentation to enter in the contest, and now I’m planning to add more. The social nature of the site is what makes it so compelling – in less than a day after I uploaded my presentation, it was viewed 91 times, and two people commented and voted on it. You should stop by and vote for it too!