Scribd.com officially launches with huge traffic

If you have ever considered sharing your documents online with others now you can. A new site called Scribd officially launched yesterday (March 12th) and is offering a service that allows users to share various document formats including Word (.doc), PDF (.pdf), text (.txt), PowerPoint (.ppt), Excel (.xls), Postscript (.ps), and LIT (.lit). The site already seems to be having huge succuess; according to Alexa.com, a popular traffic analysis web site, Scribd.com has had an increase in traffic of approximately 30,000%, making it the 4,420 most visited web site on the internet.


How does it work?

Scribd lets users publish their documents online and anyone can upload as they please. Unlike blogging, however, documents submitted by users will remain independent of each other, and will be quite difficult to monetize (make a profit from). Upon submitting articles, users will not lose the copyrights to their document, and can remove the document at any time if necessary. The documents will be viewable on the website through a custom flash based interface that allows the site's visitors to interpret the documents directly in their browser window. By utilizing flash Scribd was able to cut down on the loading time required to view pdf's. The documents can also be downloaded and saved as .pdf’s, .docs, .txt, and even .mp3 files.


What Cool Stuff is on the web site?

Their is already a wealth of great information that can be found on the site. I found dozens of illegal copies of books from the "for dummies" series:

Resumes & Cover Letters For Dummies

Visual C++ 6 for dummies Quick Ref

There were other interesting documents as well including an article written by Bill Allin titled, "Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy", which was currently the most popular article on the website with over 160,000 views.

Web Site Lets Users Start Their Own Online DVD Rental Business

The idea surrounding the Web 2.0 trend is the ability to let Internet users become more involved through social interaction (i.e. MySpace). The trend, however, also seems to be sparking ideas for new ecommerce ventures as well. Re-inventing this idea is a new web venture startup called iletyou.com; a site that is offering users the ability to start up their own online rental DVD business similar to Netflix or Blockbuster.com. In addition to over 100,000 DVD's available to rent out, 'iletyou' users will also be able to rent out nearly 5,000 video games. In case you were interested in joining, the site is currently in Private BETA and requires an invitation code so you're out of luck at the moment. Unfortunately, the site is not yet open for public viewing, and their is little information available on the company as of yet.

My Speculations About the New Service:
According to the site, you can open a store and join its rental community within a matter of minutes and even choose your pricing, which can start as low as $2.00 per rental. As far as profit margins are concerned - it is not yet clear what portion of the profits iletyou.com plans on charging for its services. However, I'm assuming its probably in the $1.00 - $1.50 range per DVD, but at this point it is just speculation. The site doesn't state whether plans are in the making for a monthly subscription based service either; however, it seems obvious that it would benefit store owner's by promoting customer loyalty. The site also looks as if it will be using a feedback system based on percentages similar to eBay:

• 
• Billy's DVD & Games
  Started: Nov 06, '06
  Movies: 69
  Games: 0
  Feedback: 0.00%

I will be following iletyou.com closely for the next few months and will post updates accordingly. In the meantime, if your interested in learning more about the site you can follow their official blog.

SocialUrl - Myspace, YouTube, Bebo, and other websites rolled up in one!

Socialurl is one of the best new attempts at combining the likes of numerous social networking sites. The site works by allowing users to add their usernames from Myspace, YouTube, and other social networking sites and combine it into one account - seems like a great idea right? Socialurl.com has a huge list of the current sites that can be integrated into it including:

The only problem is that upon opening an account at socialurl your friends will have to re-add themselves and the network will have to be built up from scratch as existing friends from Myspace and other networks cannot automically be added. In my own opinion, the site seems to be lacking in the ability to fully and properly integrate these websites together in a manner that makes since and is easy for its members. After a bit of refining, I think this site may really be on to something, but until then I think it will fail to become succuessful.

New Paid to Post and Paid to Blog Websites

More and more news websites are seeking fresh and unique content to fulfill their large readerships and create ad revenue. To fulfill this role many new websites have recently sprung up offering to pay users - most either pay per blog, but others are based on a percentage of the ad revenue created by their articles. I thought I'd look over some of these web sites and see what they had to offer:

Newsvine.com

One of these new websites is newsvine.com, where users can write their own articles and collect 90% of the ad revenue created by their stories. The sites resources for news not only include its own users, but also writers from the likes of ESPN, the Associated Press, and various other large media organizations. Just like blogs users can also post comments; in addition users also vote for articles to increase their popularity pushing them to the home page of the website.

Payperpost.com

Payperpost, another consumer generated advertising website allows bloggers to create up to 3 posts per day per approved blog. The posts must be left active for 30 days. I couldn't find any information as to what the company paid its bloggers however I'm assuming it probably varies according to the length and quality of the post.

Blogburst.com

This site submits its content to various news websites such as Reuters.com, USA today, Gannet, FoxNews.com, and many more. Bloggers are paid according to their position on the leaderboard - only the top 100 get paid (the rest do it for free I guess). The top 100 bloggers get paid quartery or 4 times a year according to their position in the chart:

Position	Q4 Payout
1	$1,500
2	$1,250
3	$1,150
4	$1,050
5	$1,000
6	$900
7	$800
8	$700
9	$600
10	$500
11	$450
12	$450
13	$400
14	$400
15	$350
16	$350
17	$300
18	$300
19	$250
20	$250
21-25	$200
26-40	$150
41-60	$100
61-80	$75
81-100	$50

Other paid to blog websites I found include, www.bloggingads.com, which pays users to place ads on their blogs (similar to AdSense), and www.blogitive.com.

Flock - The new browser in town for bloggers!

Flock? Yes, Flock and we're not talking about a flock of geese...we're talking about a fresh, new approach to the stale web browser industry which has gone relatively unchanged for years. The new 'social web browser' takes a unique and exciting approach to web browsing by offering its users the ability to connect with each others by sharing photos, blogs, and much more. This software is totally unlike its predecessors Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and the less popular Opera browser. I decided to try this new browser for myself to see what all the hype was about and came up with a few conclusions of my own.

Bart Decrem - founder of Flock.

So What's the Browser Like?

The useability of the software was right in line with firefox and internet explorer - it was straightforward and at first glance it looked just like any ordinary browser. In fact, the browser is based on the open-source Firefox model, and shares many of the same features such as tabbed browsing. The functionality, however, was much more impressive than that of internet explorer or other web browsers. Images could be easily saved to your desktop with a simple 'drag-n-drop'. In addition, users can setup their blog through the browser's interface allowing them create posts by using the shortcut 'Ctrl+B'. The browser can also be directly integrated with Flickr as well as photobucket. While Flock's features could easily be duplicated with the numerous add-on extensions available for Firefox, I think it still has some advantages over Firefox; the most obvious is that these great add-ones come "pre-installed" with the browser making it easy for users who are not looking to hassle with the complications associated with add-on extensions. The overall "look" of the navigation is also aesthetically appealing. The only major downfall is that all the added features cost precious resources in terms of memory usage.

Overall, those who will benefit the most from this new browser are bloggers who are running pc's with sufficient memory and who will be able to take advantage of the plethora of features and built in functionality associated with Flock; personally, I think I will stick with Firefox as my browser of choice for the time being. ;)

To check out some of the many great screenshots of the Flock browser click here.

You can visit the flock website at www.flock.com