Though my beginning is this field was with search, in recent years, I have not focused on it. Expect that to change, as we increasingly focus on search with SlideShare. A huge part of what we are doing is to webify the content locked up in powerpoint and other presentation files. Webifying the content means enabling it to be found by anyone who might be interested. It means search. We realize that our search sucked (there is no other way to describe it) and we did not want users to wait while we fixed it. So, the first step was simply to outsource the problem to Google – meaning use their custom site search. However, this is simply a starting point. We expect to come back and build other types of advanced search more suited to the specific nature and format of the content on SlideShare.
The second issue I am increasingly interested in is Advertising. As you can imagine, that is something we are playing around with on SlideShare. We want to get more experimental – trying more formats and placements – both with Google ads (which we currently have and on our own) and on our own.
So readers, what blogs should I start reading as I pursue this interest? Are there any books/articles that are a must read?
