SlideShare

I'd glancingly run into SlideShare a few times, but I decided it was new enough to me to qualify as a "new-to-me" 2.0 type site, so I went and looked at it some more. I knew that it was a place for people to post their Powerpoints, but that was all I knew about it.

Looking at SlideShare more deeply revealed features I hadn't expected, such as thematic groups in which you can put your presentations (here's New Yorker). You can look for events such as conferences, or browse by tags, or stick with the tried-and-true hits posted on SlideShare's home page. People may lament PowerPoint (and particularly bad PowerPoint), but there's no shortage of folks looking to share their presentations on SlideShare.

SlideShare even has toys like karaoke, which allows you to search on a tag and then watch an assortment of presentations (all with Creative Commons licenses). I'm not sure what this has to do with standing up and warbling along with ABBA's greatest hits, but if SlideShare calls it karaoke, it must be. As a Flickr addict, I have to admit that both the topic groups and the "toys" remind me of Flickr (never mind the tags, but everybody has tags these days, it seems).

So, SlideShare looks a bit like Flickr for PowerPoints. Say what you like about these presentations, they're omnipresent in some places (academia comes to mind) and it's not so bad to have a place where presentations are as accessible as photos on Flickr, or videos on YouTube.