...of limitless pot-ential
That's just awesome. No, not the silly pot ad, but the embedded viewer from Scribd (www.scribd.com), a free web service from a couple of YAPOGS* that's positioning itself as a YouTube for documents. I think Scribd has a lot of potential.
In a nutshell, Scribd will host your documents for free, and you can choose whether to make them public or keep them private. You can upload in just about any major format (including cut/paste), and Scribd will automatically OCR the text. Within minutes, Scribed publishes the document available a downloadable PDF, the cool embeddable FlashPaper PDF, a Word doc, plain text, and (get this) an mp3 of the text of your document as read by a satisfyingly futuristic computerized female voice, complete with an authoritative English accent straight out of the Sci-Fi channel.
Listen as she reads what you're reading:
Scribd makes it very easy to bulk-upload many documents at once and attach tags, descriptions, and friendly titles. There's also some very well-implemented maps and tables that detail basic stats, traffic analytics, and document attributes that're available on each document's unique homepage.
Scribd's community aspect is still forming, and, like YouTube's more freewheeling early months, there's a healthy dose of blatant copyright violation. But there's also some compelling content mixed in with the odd personal tidbits, the inevitable furry art, various 9/11 conspiracy 'reports', slapdash amateur 'how-to' guides and the persistent oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. Anyone who's ever taken a passing glance an an e-book Usenet newsgroup will recognize a lot of stuff.
I wonder if Lawrence Lessig's seen this. Moreover, I wonder if Google's seen this.
*YAPOGS (abbr.) Yet Another Pair of Geeks from Stanford
Labels: cool, document publishing, doument hosting, scribd, web 2.0, web service
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