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.
