Web 2.0 startups and social sharing being what they may, I have very mixed feelings about slideshare.
It is a nice product and does facilitate a larger need of sharing decks or single slides to enable viewing without the horribe PowerPoint and commenting on. This is good.
What is less so is that it makes it really convenient for bloggers to embed slideshows in their posts as if they are self-explaining.
Most business decks are so dense and convoluted, you are doing your audience a severe disservice by subjecting them to unedited unaccompanied versions.
I'm afraid they even don't know what keynote is.
The biggest use of slideshare in my opinion is to have you presentation as a backup online for giving the presentation or spreading it to your audience afterwards. I totally agree with you that usual presentations are not self explaining.
btw: Don't you use social bookmarking like del.icio.us or scuttle?
I usually export my presentations to PDF or Flash from Keynote and put that online somewhere. But usually my presentations are completely incromprehensible without me talking along.
I think it is cool that they support OpenOffice.
One of the more important uses of presenting is to spread ideas and the best cue if your idea is spreading is if other people start using slides from you in their presentations.
I don't think SlideShare enables that, but being able to get the source files for separate slides to use in your own presentation (Creative Commons style remixing) would be a very nice feature.
I'm afraid they even don't know what keynote is.
The biggest use of slideshare in my opinion is to have you presentation as a backup online for giving the presentation or spreading it to your audience afterwards. I totally agree with you that usual presentations are not self explaining.
btw: Don't you use social bookmarking like del.icio.us or scuttle?
And finally, greetings from Hamburg