I don't care what Edward Tufte says about PowerPoint, the source of the problem lies not with the tool but with the tool user.

PowerPoint presentations can be extremely effective, for example, consider Lawrence Lessig’s style, and no matter how much criticism people might heap upon them there’s little chance that corporate America is going to jettison PowerPoint presentations in the near future.

My focus this week is on a distribution platform for slideshows called SlideShare, which combines slideshow distribution with (guess what) social networking.

You can upload presentations in PowerPoint (ppt and pps), OpenOffice (odp), and PDF format as long as they don’t exceed 30MB. SlideShare’s servers convert your uploaded presentations into Flash movies complete with controls to navigate the content.

SlideShare converted presentations are a little limited as transitions and animations aren’t supported. This is a big issue and hopefully one that the company will fix in the near future. Embedded sound is also not supported but you can synchronize audio files hosted elsewhere on the Internet – a feature that SlideShare calls “slidecasting.”

The service is still under development and in the SlideShare FAQ the company confesses that when slideshow conversions fail with the hugely useless error message of “OOPs” you will have to hunt around for the cause – their service doesn’t explain what went wrong. According to the FAQ, “it's possible our converter is temporarily down, try uploading once again / if your file is password protected or contains macros, you might get an OOPs; remove them and upload again / this might occur if your presentation file has a reference to an external image or file (i.e. instead of embedding the image inside the presentation, it is kept on your computer and referenced externally from within the file); you can solve this by embedding the image in your file and uploading again.”

On the plus side, “The entire content of your slideshow - slide transcripts, slide title, description, tags etc will be indexed by search engines and show up in search results.”

The original presentation is also kept on SlideShare, which allows you to download it as needed (for example, when you’re at a prospect’s office or speaking at a conference and your laptop has just died and your backup CD is scratched).

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.