I have to agree – SlideShare is superior in its offerings and re-usability. My only gripe with it is slow upload and it being ‘yet another place’ to manage stuff. Right now, I think we will continue using it as our main slide source though.

The ‘access control fail’ thing is interesting – that’s interesting as in, “quite frustrating”, you understand… because it was a barrier to easy access to the presentations during the event which would have been useful. I thought I’d seen successful use of public stuff within Google docs but perhaps I’m mis-remembering? I know that the presentations could be downloaded and viewed locally, but having them embeddable (tweetable, and properly linkable) would have been a win I think.

More generally, I think any consideration of where to host stuff has to include both the needs/expectations of the user as well as the provider. Just cos something is easier to maintain/create doesn’t make it the right choice. Slideshare has kinda become the de facto standard for online presentations, so people just expect that to be the done thing. To do something different detracts from much of the ’social’ benefit of making the stuff available – commenting, re-embedding, etc.

I tend to agree with your sentiments about Ning.

Note that none of this detracts from an otherwise highly successful event.