Slideshare.net is looking like a real winner in the online media sharing market. Their Youtube-style content portal is designed for hosting and sharing slideshows, presentations, and 'slidecasts', and is currently the leading site in this sector. I had a little explore of the various features on offer to see just how good it really is...
The first thing new visitors will recognise is the layout - the homepage features a search bar, a tag cloud, and then selections of most popular, most downloaded, and recently added shows. Further down there are links to users and groups (like Youtube, Slideshare encourages users to register into the community - though you can use the site without doing this).
All in all the interface is functional and easy to use and, perhaps most importantly, it is also instantly familiar due to the popularity of the globally successful Youtube layout. So far so good in terms of attracting new users.
What distinguishes Slideshare from other competitors such as Flickr or Bubbleshare is that, while these photo sharing sites allow for slideshow options, they are not specifically dedicated to the slideshow format as the primary content form. Slideshare has a narrower focus and hence can deliver a far more developed and comprehensive service.
For example, Slideshare offers extensive SEO potential. The effective use of keywords in both slideshow titles and summaries boosts Google rankings, as does relevant tag deployment. A nice touch is that Slideshare widgets can be added to blogs or websites (again much like Youtube), meaning Slideshare provides a very easy way to add this content type to websites - and achieve greater SEO as a result.
In addition Slideshare allows for closed communities to be formed among friends or work colleagues - so that private slideshows can be shared. Potentially this provides a great method to exchange work presentations in a secure environment between colleagues, or private photo slideshows among friends/family.
The slidecasts function is also a nice touch - allowing for combining slides with mp3s to create musical presentations, comedy clips, or whatever else. This is likely to greatly increase the capacity of Slideshare to attract entertaining content, as well as the more obvious presentations, how-to tutorials, and webinars...
The potential for serious learning materials to be shared is another exciting prospect. In theory we could see a Wikipedia style function emerge except that, rather than hosting articles (like Wikipedia), Slideshare could have presentations explaining complex scientific concepts, historical periods, political ideas etc.
Furthermore, universities or colleges could create closed networks within which to share lecture presentations with all students who are enrolled at their institutions. This could provide a great way to pool learning resources and grant access to material across all departments - creating an online library of all lecture slideshows.
Slideshare was founded in 2006, and has gone from strength to strength since. Though currently still in a Beta testing stage, it has become increasingly popular since that time. If they can continue to add features and improve their service, while retaining the specificity of their function (i.e. not expanding into video for example), then I think they can surely corner this sector as their own in the same way that Youtube has taken the video sharing market. Exciting times lie ahead for this unique start-up; - we'll keep you updated...
Dejan Levi
