3 online sharing solutions for your documents

If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of documents that have piled up over the years. People my age (recent college grads) are some of the worst, with nearly a decade of research papers, projects, and various snippets saved along the way--many of which took hours of hard work and are now relegated to a hard archive somewhere in your documents folder or on burnt optical media. Luckily for your files, there are a few places to share them with others who might be interested in reading.

Scribd is one of the most popular solutions, and my personal favorite of the bunch. It calls itself the "YouTube for documents," which is a fairly apt description. Scribd users can share popular document formats like Word, PDF, plain text, PowerPoint, and Excel. Each uploaded document can be made private or public, and is completely searchable. Users can also embed a document on Scribd on any Web site or blog. Users who like what they see can save the file as a PDF, Word file, text, or MP3 (spoken by an electronic voice).

What's really neat about Scribd is the built-in statistics tracking. This lets you keep track of when and where people have looked at your work, with some neat charts and a viewing log.

YouScript has been around for a couple of months now. YouScript gives your documents (mainly movie or TV scripts) a social networking spin, with the option to create writing groups to share your files with others online. Each group can schedule meetings, hand out assignments or homework, and discuss work in the integrated forums and comments. Unlike Scribd, however there's no built-in reader, and documents are managed in a PDF viewer.

OpenFloodgate is a document sharing service created by a Tina Seelig, executive director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. We heard about OpenFloodgate this morning and were pitched with the idea that it could be used to share documents for small companies using its document privacy features. Any uploaded document is displayed in an HTML viewer that converts each page into its own image. What's neat is OpenFloodgate's text size selector. This lets you pick from three sizes, including extralarge, which is about the size of a children's book. Also cool are user comments, which shows up as an overlay box on top of the document, not as a separate section.

I'd expect to see more of these sites popping up in the future, although with Google Docs, Thinkfree, and Zoho at work on online replacements for our office apps, we're likely to see file migration moving further and further away from the hard drive.

[jerrylippman_ny]

Business file sharing and online collaboration

I have always been mislead to some crippled file sharing service on the Internet. For real file sharing, we are talking more about drag and drop, Windows shared folder kind of documents sharing, sharing of remote mountable drives/folders, and being able to set folders with different access rights to different users. This is essentail in file sharing for business. We need to share files with co-workers and with our remote customers. and I found DriveHQ.com online file sharing service is much better on this.

[jerrylippman_ny]

Business file sharing and online collaboration

I have always been mislead to some crippled file sharing service on the Internet. For real file sharing, we are talking more about drag and drop, Windows shared folder kind of documents sharing, sharing of remote mountable drives/folders, and being able to set folders with different access rights to different users. This is essentail in file sharing for business. We need to share files with co-workers and with our remote customers. and I found DriveHQ.com online file sharing service is much better on this.

[caldwdo]

Self-publishing in another venue

Thanks for the mention about scribd as I looking for another web-based site to publish some material. Which led me to this transcript of Late Night host Conan O'Brien's graduation speech at Harvard in 2000. This will be the subject of my blog in June when the graduation season is under way. Thanks for getting me to the site. http://www.scribd.com/doc/1312/Harvard-Graduation-Speech-by-Conan-OBrien
www.dougcaldwell.net

[caldwdo]

Self-publishing in another venue

Thanks for the mention about scribd as I looking for another web-based site to publish some material. Which led me to this transcript of Late Night host Conan O'Brien's graduation speech at Harvard in 2000. This will be the subject of my blog in June when the graduation season is under way. Thanks for getting me to the site. http://www.scribd.com/doc/1312/Harvard-Graduation-Speech-by-Conan-OBrien
www.dougcaldwell.net