SlideShare

What´s that?
SlideShare is world largest community for sharing presentations in the www environment. It contains powerpoint or pdf presentation about different topics. The company is based in USA in California and her biggest investor is Venrock .

How does it work?
It´s possible to go throught webpage, browse, searche, watch slideshows or send them per email. That all you can do from the post of guest, which does not call for registration.
If you really would like to use this "service" with all its odds, you have to sign you up. It´s for free and it enables you to download or upload slideshows from/on the webside, leave comments for whole presentation or for each separate slide (what I find interesting and helpful) and much more...

SlideShare offers traditional simple tool for searching which is based on keywords, you can sort it by relevance or other different classifications. Then you can use the metod of tagging or search according to groups or events.

Groups and events connect slideshows with the same or similar topic, place, time or what ever... and create that kind of subcultur. These subculturs are not just about the slideshows, but in particular about people. Each user could be member of group what ever he wants and share by this way his/her experiences with that topic.

One of the interesting offers is Widget. When you use this package, you could publish presentation from the SlideShare on your own webpages or blog as an inner part of your webpages. Not as appendix or as a link on special webpages. The presentation is simply implemented in your webpages and you can browse through it without the loss of context from your own webpages.

Conclusion
SlideShare looks like really serious webpage, whose goal is not primary to entertain people, but really help and connect them with the relevant information. If I would have possibility to influence the development of this webpage, I would focus on search tools. I miss search tool with focus on subject content.
But I am sure that I could find there a lot of helpful information even with the basic search tool.

Resources: www.slideshare.net