SlideShare is a slide hosting service: it allow users to upload, view, comment, and share slideshows created with presentation programs.
When visiting the site you are welcomed with a short description of SlideShare's abilities: 'Upload and share your PowerPoint & Keynote presentations, Word &PDF documents on SlideShare. Add audio to make a webinar. Capture leads with your presentations.' So SlideShare does not simply enable users to upload slides, it supports also other formats (including OpenOffice - a great advantage in my view). Additionally, users can add audio to their presentations, embed YouTube Videos inside presentations and make use of event functionality to send conference invites, etc.
SlideShare enables 100 MB per presentation, and this is useful when making an extensive presentation with many pictures. Documents can be made public, remain private or can be accessible only to those, who the author identifies as friends : when registration is completed, user is asked if he would like to import friends from existing email addresses, so SlideShare is obviously intended to works also as a social networking site.
After uploading a presentation to this slide hosting service, I had to to wait a while in order for the presentation to load completely. Then I could take a look at my presentation and the first thing I noticed was, that the site looks a lot like YouTube: the presentation on the left and on the right user information and presentation description. Beneath, thiere is a 'related presentations' section and under the presentation part are links to different social networking sites, blog platforms, etc. and a 'comment' section. I like the fact that a HTML code, which allows embedding it to a web site or blog, is available and situated in a visible spot.
Presentations are easy to manage and the site itself is easy to use. SlideShare users can also join groups by interests and debate about any subject they are interested in.
I like this tool, because it is user-friendly and really easy to use, there is no need for tutorials on the basic operations, but I intend to look deeper into its functions. Unfortunately, I can't make any comparisons yet, since this is the only slide hosting service I ever tried.
Well, here is the the result of my 'curiosity': (please note that this presentation of collaborative project is still in progress so this is a working version of my part only)
I was also surprised by the simplicity of the use of SlideShare when I encoutered it for the first time. It quite simple to navigate through the page itself and I agree with you that you hardly need a tutorial. So from the point of it's functionality and usefulness I think it's great. But what I found unsatisfactory when I started using it was that it isn't possible to have the oral presentation in the same program and in the same time. You first have to make the presentation in SlideShare public to everyone to see, and if you don't do that, you have to invite all of the participants, if you want them to see the presentation. Then you have to choose another program for the oral presentation (for example Skype, Webex...) and use them both in the same time. When we had our presentation in NM&S class, we found Google Docs' presentation just as useful as SlideShare. I guess it just makes a difference if you want your presentation to be public for everyone to see. In this case, SlideShare is definitively the right address.
OdgovoriIzbrišiI did not go so far as to see how the oral presentation works and now that you mentioned it, I am a bit disappointed myself. I guess they fooled me by saying that oral presentation is possible, so I figured, that there must be something like an extra application for that.
OdgovoriIzbrišiAs for the publicness of the presentation: I like the idea that your presentation can be private and accessible only to a selected number of people when desired, but I agree with you, that other forms of presentation are more appropriate when dealing with public)lectures and seminars.