At the “art of the start” conference last week, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch was interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about “How to Get on TechCrunch”. Michael basically said that you shouldn’t use words like “revolutionary” and “web 2.0” to describe your site: it’s too generic and doesn’t carry any information. He cited slideshare as an example of a good pitch (our pitch was “YouTube for Powerpoint”). Rashmi was called up onto the stage to talk about the “TechCrunch effect” and the effect it had on slideshare.
Here’s the video of rashmi being interviewed. The funniest part is when Rashmi mentions that people upload sermons to slideshare. Guy responded in a deadpan voice “well, God does have 30% market share”. Worth watching!
Author: jonathanboutelle
Web site monitoring service recommendations
Can anyone recommend a good website monitoring service (doesn’t have to be free)?
I need sms and email alerts, the ability to send alerts when response time goes up or when a page contains particular text, and a minimum of false positives.
So far I’ve tested the following freebies and found them lacking in one way or another:
site247 (false positives: otherwise would have seemed the best option)
Mon.itor.us (tests only once a day. Very confusing interface)
Montastic (way too basic)
Next up for evaluation are the following paid services: if anyone has any experience with these, or has other services they think I should try, post a comment below!
siteuptime
websitepulse
alertra
doc-com monitor
internetseer
hyperspin
webmetrics
hosttracker
siterecon
watchmouse
11/15 Correction: mon.itor.us actually tests much more often than once a day.
Interview in Indezine
Indezine (a web magazine for presentation professionals) has just published an interview with me.
Here’s an excerpt:
The most inspiring thing to me about SlideShare is the number of teachers that are using SlideShare to share lessons and lecture slides. I love the idea that we’re helping teachers do the important work of educating the next generation!
Interview in business 2.0
Business 2.0 has published an interview with me answering some questions about Slideshare. My favorite quote:
What we’re seeing, though, is that PowerPoint and other presentation formats provide the ability to create narratives and do user-generated multimedia that goes beyond traditional PowerPoint for a talk or business meeting. For example, lots of people are uploading photosets or stories or video game screen shots.
Slideshare: new social features!
We just rolled out a whole bunch of new features on Slideshare. The writeup is here. The biggest new feature is that we now have a way to save your favorite slideshows, and optionally tag them.
Lessons learned from the first month of Slideshare: part 1
Slideshare.net has been online for almost a month, and we’ve learned a lot about running a large-scale social sharing website in that time. The first few days were frantic, but we’re settling back into a rhythm now. This series of posts will try to capture some of the stuff we learned through this experience.
Halloween on slideshare
Halloween fun on slideshare.
In Delhi for the next little while
I’m with my team in New Delhi, working on a whole truckload of new features for slideshare. I just got here yesterday, and I’ll be here for at least the next two weeks.
Anyone in Delhi who wants to meet up, give me a buzz! I’m especially interested in connecting with the Delhi Ruby/Rails community this trip. I’m also interviewing candidates for a few positions that we are hiring for (see this post for details).
Slideshare: open for business
Over the last few weeks, we’ve added a few servers to the slideshare cluster, and fixed a bunch of bugs. We’re ready for our closeup! From now on, you can browse slideshare without a userid (you still need to have a login if you want to upload PowerPoint files or comment on a slideshow however).
We’ve also added a Digg This! button. The coolest part is that the thumbnails of the slideshows already show up on digg. How do they do that???
Lots of social features still to come… but the biggest feature by far is the wacky content that some of our community members upload. Check out this animated fight between shaquille oneil, bin ladin, and george bush!
Want to work on slideshare?
We are amazed and thankful at the huge response we’ve gotten to SlideShare in just five days since launch, and need to hire developers and a sysadmin immediately to keep up with the enthusiasm. Positions available are for our team in New Delhi (the Uzanto team is a small, tightly-knit team of developers and designers in India & US).
We work with cutting edge technologies – Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services. We are looking for developers and a sys admins. Our setup consists of Ruby, Rails, MySQL, lighttpd/mongrel, Pound, FreeBSD, and Debian. We run our Rails apps on a 7-machine FreeBSD/Debian cluster (and Amazon S3).
jonathanboutelle.com 