Portent

I like the idea behind Scribd but I suspect it may go on to achieve a level of notoreity of the kind associated with Youtube for copyright infringement! Anyone can upload any document (picture, book, text) free.

It started a month after Portent (in September 2006). You can even get things printed from it via an associated service and even money if someone prints something of yours.

Some of the thing you can publish (taken from their FAQ) include:

• School papers
• Poems
• PowerPoint presentations
• Serious academic research articles
• Funny pictures
• Free online books
• Excel Spreadsheets
• Commentary on current events
• Musical scores

I can think of all sorts of things that people might put up there that might prove controversial- eg exam answers, guitar tabs (the subject of a witch hunt by music publishers at the moment), confidential documents, "Forbidden secrets!", source code for software, even mp3s (converted into ascii – how people used to move binary files around 20 years ago).

They've done an excellent job- storage is unlimited and each document has it's own url (so can be indexed by Google). Google currently finds 51,600 items on Scribd. It's becoming a very popular site. Some of the things you can do

• Display documents in a web browser using a custom Flash PDF player
• Perform high quality conversions between many different formats,
  including Word, PDF, plain text, HTML, JPEG, PowerPoint, Excel,
  Postscript, LIT, and even audio format
• See all sorts of detailed information on who is viewing each of
  your documents, including the geographic locations of visitors and how
  people got to your doc (i.e., Google queries)
• Publish a document online with its own public URL that will be
  indexed by Google and other search engines and be read by a lot of
  people
• Embed a long or complex document in your blog or personal webpage
• Convert a document to an mp3 that you can listen to on your iPod
• Bulk upload files (that's right, storage is unlimited!)
• Receive "likes" and comments on your documents
• Choose among a variety of copyright licenses for each of your documents
• Receive money every time someone orders a printed copy of your docs
• Discover documents related to your own using our similarity algorithm
• Analyze the text of your docs (how does your sentence length compare to the Scribd average?)
• Browse popular documents using view counts, likes, tags, our
  similarity algorithm, and other ways that let you find content that is
  interesting to you.

I wonder if they'll publish an API (like Flickr has). I could see developers writing software to use the site. The big challenge for them will be keeping on top of copyright (and not getting sued by publishers!)

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