SlideShare: YouTube for Presesentations

I signed up for an account on SlideShare shortly after Mor Naaman told me about this social networking service for slides (after I’d asked him for his slides from Mobile Persuasion 2007). SlideShare is like a YouTube for presentations, with capabilities for creating links to or embedding slides into a web page (such as a blog), tagging, commenting, favoriting, grouping and subscribing.

It seems to me (and others) that any social networking service offers some form of self-presentation (manifestations of Erving Goffman’s notions of Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), so it’s only natural to have a service devoted to the self-presentation of presentations. Of course, most people don’t create and give presentations on a daily basis, so this service may have a more limited set of producers and consumers than, say, Flickr.

I see that there are entire conferences represented [pun intended] on SlideShare. Given that it is an increasingly common practice to post photos from a conference with a particular tag, e.g., "pervasive07", it will be interesting to see whether a conference content aggregator service emerges in the near future.

Although I haven’t given any conference presentations recently, I decided to experiment with the site by uploading some older presentations. I hope to have some new presentations (and papers) to share in the near future, and may even experiment with uploading presentations before a conference (er, except that I’m usually, er, "refining" the presentations right up until I take the stage).

Anyhow, a selection of oldies [but goodies (?)] is included below.