In a blog you write a story, in which you include one or more photos, images, diagrams or graphs for illustration (or because it attracts and holds attention). After all, if the story requires it, you want to use the multimedia options that are much easier to add in a blog than in a paper text. You often see a YouTube video embedded in a blog, with the same function: it illustrates your story with images and sound, and attracts attention.
The same possibility to enrich your story with images is given by including (embedding) a SlideShare presentation in your blog post. Especially if you are writing a blog post whose theme is related to a presentation (yours or someone else's) that is on SlideShare. The added value can be:
Blog and presentation: agreement in 'genre'
An idea, train of thought, or argument, a complicated method of research, or the results of research in a list to data few telling graphs are often already more or less 'polished' and concise: presented briefly and powerfully in well-maintained presentation slides that, if you're lucky, are ready for you on SlideShare. In a blog too, the guideline often prevails to keep it concise and not to elaborate or digress too much. If your presentation slides can replace a lot of text to take the place of what you wanted to say with a lot of text that is not easy to understand, then such a presentation is a welcome and visually attractive addition to the blog text.
Slides as custom illustrations
In line with this, the reverse situation: creating a presentation and uploading it to SlideShare, just for the sake of illustrating it in a blog. I have come across a presentation on SlideShare that consisted of one slide or a presentation of three or five slides. Perhaps these mini-presentations were never presented 'live with an audience', but were intended to be included as an illustration in a web page or blog article.
This may seem like a cumbersome procedure, but on closer inspection it is more effective and efficient than making illustrations yourself. Because how do you make a nice bar graph, organizational chart or flowchart in a web editor, such as WordPress?
Integration instead of linking elsewhere
And not unimportant: with a link to somewhere else, in this case to SlideShare, there is always the chance that a reader will leave your blog and perhaps not return to it quickly. After all, a link that raises expectations invites you to click on it. That is not such a problem with microblogging (see above: Facebook and Twitter), but in a blog you may not want that.
Online presence
If it is important that your activities on the web are easily found, then the integration discussed above can be of great importance. After all, in personal branding or research activities of students, PhD candidates and scientists, it is all about an online profile . If the parts of that profile, instead of being fragmented and scattered, are visibly related to each other, its impact will be greater.
It is not without reason that a weblog is often referred to as the social hub for one's activities on various social media. The impact of a blog platform and that of a presentation platform can complement and reinforce each other. Especially when WordPress is such a good host for a SlideShare slideshow.
Finally: hands-on
How do you do that, integrate a SlideShare presentation into a WordPress post? To the left of the presentation are the social bookmarking icons. Click on the WordPress icon. You will then get a screen with options:
slideshare
Click 'Copy' to copy the embed code (called 'shortcode' here). In the WordPress editor, place the cursor where you want to place your presentation. For illustration purposes, I have done this below. It is a presentation by Joël Bosch about the experiment among students at Radboud University in Nijmegen (summer 2012).
SlideShare is a social content network with rich content: in addition to PowerPoint and Keynote presentations, you increasingly see PDF files that you play as a presentation, within SlideShare or embedded in a WordPress post. You are free to (re)use presentations from others, as long as you mention the source with a link to the location. If you do not have a SlideShare account, you can view everything there and then, and integrate presentations in a WordPress article, for example. But perhaps this story has motivated you to create a SlideShare account.