Slideshare Zeitgeist 2010

Slideshare posted its annual Zeitgeist with some remarkable observations and findings and links to the most popular slide shares of the year. If you use slide share for whatever reason you will find some helpful data in there.

Some obeservations:

Popular presentations have more slides. While most presentations are short popular presentations are longer (63 slides on average).
Popular presentations use fewer words.
On average women use fewer slides than men.
Coleur Locale also applies to presentation length.
Japanese language presenters use the most slides on average—42 slides per presentation. English language presenters, on the other hand, use the fewest slides per presentation—19.
Apple Keynote users make popular presentations. While Keynote was only used by 2% of the presenters, 16% of the most popular presentations were made using Keynote.
Business, trends and statistics dominate popular tags. Tags are words used to describe presentations on SlideShare. The most popular presentation tags for 2010 included business, market, trends, research, social media and statistics.
Popular presentations don’t use serifs. While 10% of popular presentations used the serif font Times New Roman, the majority of popular presentations included fonts without serifs such as Arial and Helvetica.

Personally I found that going through the most popular slide share presentations (links are in the slide share above) a helpful exercise in presentation technique.