Was YouTube für Videoclips ist, soll “Scribd” (www.scribd.com) für Text-Dateien werden. Das Portal zieht kurz nach dem Marktstart bereits über 100.000 User täglich an.

Beim großen Vorbild stellen die Nutzer eigene Videos ein. Andere k…

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A casual glance just now shows at least two documents about explosives - like we all need more of those - in the first three browse pages. While I actually can see that there are genuine bomb/explosive historians and lovers who would be thrilled with that information, I find it much easier to see how this site could be used to do a *lot* of harm.

I can see the usual cop-out clause “Scribd does not endorse any User Content or any opinion, recommendation or advice expressed therein,” but I’d much rather see a huge “Is this content objectionable ? Press this to let us now ASAP” button.

Scrybe’s developers are interested in protecting the privacy of under 13 year olds, but are happy to print recipes that show lunatics how to blown those kids and their parents to pieces. Why?

The internet is superb and is, I believe, a factor that will continue to change things for the good, but we do also have to make sure that the knowledge of how to do harm isn’t freely given to those who would harm us.

People have already been publishing their documents and texts (blogs anyone) forever. How is the utility of Scribd any different (or better) to that of Google?

Drama 2.0 - are you the smartest poster on TechCrunch or what? Wow do I agree with you.

Giving up equity to a law firm is a dumb idea. The only person who should get equity, if at all, is the partner working for you. The firm as an entity has no incentive - free rider problem.

A revenue model idea for someone:
- a site where you can BUY (yes BUY) notes from conference speeches

This would be quite valuable. There are a lot of conferences I don’t have the time or money to attend. If someone just uploaded their notes from these presentations, I wouldn’t mind paying a $1 or $2 per session. For one conference, that’s probably $30-$40 worth of notes. 10 conferences a year that I care about - okay I’ll pay $299 for a year’s subscription to all conferences in my vertical. Oh wait! That’s not a Y-Combinator model! Who would ever acquire a site that actually has paying users (GASP!)

If there’s anything Web 1.0 was good at it was putting “documents” online for the whole world to find. Documents = web pages. There are already a ton of services that do a decent job of finding interesting web pages — Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.

I looked at 5 of the most popular Scribd documents and the content was all available elsewhere as a web page. The only “exclusive to Scribd” content I found looked like it belonged as a blog post (where it would be better served). If someone has good content to share with the world why choose to publish it in an offline format and then upload that document to a website?

Specialized content aggregation sites make sense for video (YouTube) and presentations (Slideshare) precisely because those types of content are different enough from the page-based model upon which the web is based. But a website specializing in “documents” is like a fish specializing in water.

They don’t get the benefit of the DCMA. While YouTube can at least argue the difficulty of scanning/filtering video, text is *easy* and *trivial* to scan. All a company has to do is tell them, don’t put up any “Simpsons” documents unless you make sure they qualify under fair use, and *that’s enough* to make them liable for any infringing document.

Hiring the same team defending YouTube was just a stupid decision. These are the same bozos that convinced YouTube that they’d be off the hook. And the way things are going, YT is going to payout several hundred million…if they’re lucky.

The other scenario is that of sharing documents with yourself, i.e. decoupling your critical documents from your laptop or desktop computer, so that they are available to you anywhere. Here again, specific requirements would be the notion of privacy, and search within your documents. We have something that does this and more (but for presentations only). It would be interesting for scribd to morph into a document repository in the ether (for small and medium businesses).

I’m not so sure the Youtube model is successful if applied to other contexts. Well, I’m not so sure the youtube model is successful even in its own context :), google acquisitions notwithstanding.

# dave

March 25th, 2007 at 2:32 am

This certainly is not a new idea says this blog - check this link
http://www.irin…hive.php?id=853

dave,

Here’s the difference:

TechRepublic is a **waaaayy** vertical market (i.e. “Tech”?). Plus, their site requires registration, givin’ up of your email address, and (I believe) is only available as PDFs.

The difference *appears* to be that you can take what you’d like…and leave the rest.

I see this as a “read-only” Writely…I smell an acquisition…

Just my $0.02.

Perhaps they have intentions on letting people upload their docs and then sell the downloads of them…? I suppose that would work, but then you run in to the problem of the author having to market their document to generate any sales. And if Scribd is only getting a fraction of those sales, they’ll need a ton of docs being paid for to ever sniff the black.

Interesting product, and that in itself could be a winner. But the financial viability of a site that has no where for me to enter my credit card doesn’t inspire much confidence.

-JLB

regards,
jean

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