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Has anyone considered using SlideShare to host slides from talks? In much the same way arXiv hosts papers.

Truth be told, the slides are often much easier to absorb than the papers. Sometimes I will Google a paper and find 10 versions of the slides floating around.

These are usually hosted by conferences or on personal websites. Unfortunately, when the conference site or home page dies, the slides go with them.

Example: holographic entanglement entropy

It may be better to collect them into one place. Of course, this is a lot of work to maintain and perhaps can detract from the informal nature of the slides.

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    $\begingroup$ I never heard of slideshare; the name is somehow self-explanatory, I searched for it, easily found it, and likely could find out something about it. However, it could be more efficient if you provided some information on it, or at least a link, in the question (as opposed to letting everybody, not too few I assume, that shares my ignorance, search for it). $\endgroup$
    – user9072
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 17:52
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    $\begingroup$ Well, now that you have brought the site to people's attention, I'm sure they have considered it. But this seems more appropriate for a personal blog, not MathOverflow. $\endgroup$
    – Zev Chonoles
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 18:25
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    $\begingroup$ Search and browsing will be difficult as SlideShare has no specific category for mathematics, or even science. "Education" is the closest (perhaps?), but it is much too broad. Nevertheless, thank you for the idea. $\endgroup$
    – Margaret Friedland
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 18:29
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    $\begingroup$ ArXiv already has the infrastructure with useful categories, abstracts, revision control, and whatnot, making it easy to search. I’d guess there is no technical obstacle why they couldn’t host slides as well as papers, and it doesn’t seem too far away from their original mission either. If the need for a slide repository arises, perhaps persuading arXiv to do it would be a good option? $\endgroup$
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 18:51
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    $\begingroup$ @Zev This is not a personal question, this is a soft question about ways to help communicate mathematics effectively. $\endgroup$
    – john mangual
    Commented Jul 2, 2013 at 19:00

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Best to collect relevant slides as well as all other worthwhile resources in a place that is hyperlinked and provides background and context, in order for the information to be not just recorded/stored, but also usefully connected to potential readers.

For instance your links are now here:

If you wish you can also upload the files themselves.

There is so much useful information in the mathematical community which is kept in small sub-communities only and propagates only super-slowly from one person to another and through the bigger community, precisely because such contextual interlinking is still rare. This is a state of affairs not quite up to the standard of technology these days, where we should be able to find resources in research mathematics via computer search engines. This works as soon as you put your notes (such as links to talks you heard) into a contextually hyperlinked wiki.

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