LinkedIn’s SlideShare now lets you bookmark specific slides

In 2012, LinkedIn acquired SlideShare to add its online community of documents to LinkedIn’s collective knowledge. Today, the professional social networking company is further integrating SlideShare into the fold by rebranding the acquisition and making it easier to share knowledge among its 70 million users.

Meet LinkedIn SlideShare, the rebranded document-sharing service. But that’s not really the big news — it’s the release of Clipping, a new feature that lets users save the best slides from anyone’s presentation to reference later in what LinkedIn calls “Clipboards.” There are no limits to how many slides you can clip or how many Clipboards can be created.

Think about Clipping like a bookmark tool. If you come across a great presentation and find a slide you want to keep, you could save the entire presentation. But will you remember exactly which slide you’re interested in? Clipping takes the slide you want and imports it into an area where you can curate a collection of similarly themed slides.

You can prevent others from Clipping your presentation by adjusting the setting for that particular file. However, LinkedIn frowns upon this, telling VentureBeat that it would like to help spread content to “an entirely new audience.” Presentation statistics have also been enhanced to now display which slide has been Clipped the most.

Clipping a slide is pretty simple within LinkedIn SlideShare. When you’re viewing the presentation, in the lower left corner there will be a link that reads “Clip Slide”. When you’re finished, you can specify which of your Clipboards you’d like to save the slide to. Additionally, you have the option of sharing that clip across social media.

If you make a mistake or want to undo your clip, it can all be reverted with just a click of the mouse.

The offer of more granular sharing is unsurprising, as users can now build their own library of topical knowledge. And there’s quite a lot of content to tap into — LinkedIn has revealed it now has 18 million presentations stored within SlideShare, an 80 percent increase since 2013. Every month, 400,000 presentations are added.

LinkedIn says it will not be charging for Clipping, which will be accessible to anyone with a SlideShare account. Clipping is only available through the Web, but LinkedIn says the team is “looking to expand to mobile in the near future.”