Now, today's presentations are much more lively, you can do lots of fun stuff with them. Play videos, animate text, blink tags (nooooo!!!!!) and much more. My company even makes a product where you can collaboratively develop slides.
But, fundamentally slides are a data sink. How do you get data out of a slide? Copy and paste. It promotes a style of presentation that is artfully designed, and final. Sure, you can copy slides back and forth from one deck to another. Sure, you can change how they look, and copy and paste the text into other documents. But try to get the data out of the slides programatically. Or better yet, auto generate some slides from data. Wouldn't it be great to have all your slides tagged for content, or have it in an XML format that allowed you to XQuery for specific content?
The other thing I hate is it encourages people to think they can present a topic if they have the slides. That they don't need to know the actual content, just be able to read the slides and ad lib a bit. Slides should be an end point, a representation of an accumulated knowledge.
I prefer to show code or run demos, but there's usually not a great way to share that kind of presentation off a conference web site. But there's a well established tradition of sharing slides.
I actually developed a really not great version of a slides database back in 2005. It ran on Berkeley DB and had a Java interface. I realize how hard it is to conceptualize this kind of app.
I'm not saying I have the answer either. But I'm really tired of apps that are just about presenting data and don't actually allow any access to that data. How did we get to a point where the static visualization of content was the final point of how to communicate it? Why is our model for content sharing an outmoded form of film production?