Openfloodgate, like Scribd, lets content creators publish their works to the web, but with decidedly more control. The site is the project of Tina Seelig, Executive Director of Stanford Technology Venture Partners and Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship. Recently released from beta about two weeks ago, OpenFloodgate currently features a variety of stories, poems, lyrics, photos, recipes, etc, uploaded by the site’s users. Once uploaded, each work can then be rated, downloaded as a pdf, and commented on by other users.
OpenFloodgate provides more control than other publishing sites. First, the site allows publishers to limit who can see their work to a group or just yourself. Also, unlike other document sharing sites, OpenFloodgate publishes every work as series of image files or PDFs, making it harder to plagiarize the author’s content. This puts OpenFloodgate, and sites like it, in a better position to handle the copyright woes that come along with user generated content and also eventually charge for the content down the road.
