This weekend’s plaything is Scribd, a document sharing website. If you have a PDF, Word doc, spreadsheet, powerpoint, image or open office doc – for example, annual reports, raw material, etc. – this is a good place to put it to make it both interactive and conversational.
A quick look at the tag cloud reveals some useful sources too, including the environmental protection agency, NASA, food and drug agency and so on (it is currently, as you’d expect, very US dominated).
Here’s some of the features:
- Post comments on documents
- Email to someone, or embed on your own webpage/blog
- Add to a group
- See traffic analytics
- Engage in communities
- RSS feeds
The tagging and other description features also make this potentially useful for file management – a delicious for PDFs?
The ability to create groups has potential for crowdsourcing – see this LA Metro Transit group for an example.
But in general this is just a better alternative to simply posting a link to a PDF on your website.
Read more ‘Something for the weekend’ posts
Good find Paul, this is going to be dead useful for me.
Know what’s even better?
People are posting their FOIA results. This is powerful stuff.
I just wrote a bit on why I think Scribd is important, that you might find interesting.
Also, Mashable just posted a head-to-head comparison of Scribd and four other document sharing sites: Yudu, Issuu, Calameo, and Docstock
@Brian – brilliant, thanks for that link.
[...] It gets better: if you email photos, video or audio it is automatically embedded in a Flash player. Link to a YouTube, Google Video, Justin.TV, Vimeo or Omnisio video and it’s automatically embedded as well. Send more than one image and a gallery is created. PDFs, PowerPoint and Word documents are also embedded using previous SFTW Scribd. [...]