Neil Squillante of TechnoLawyer fame has an excellent appreciation of the potential of an interesting web service called Scribd today on the TechnoLawyer Blog. As he notes, I’ve also found it intriguing enough to do some experimenting with it.
I had seen a few mentions of Scribd being described as a YouTube for documents.
Neil hits a home run with his analysis of the possibilities of Scribd. My thinking, until I read Neil’s post, was much simpler.
I thought about the number of documents, mainly PDFs, I have lounging around on my hard drives, not doing any work for me or anyone else. A great example is seminar handouts I’ve done over the years.
I typically don’t put those documents up on my website or post them to my blog. For any number of reasons.
Scribd seems to offer a way to easily put documents, especially large ones, up on the web without using up your own hosting space. And, if Scribd catches on, it potentially opens up a secondary audience for documents that are otherwise sitting on my hard drive.
My thinking was not much more complex than that. I put up one document, a collection of some of my articles on electronic discovery, as an experiment, and was going to add some others in the near future. Lo and behold, Neil spotted it after a couple of days and mentioned it.
In the same way SlideShare offers a way to make presentation slides easily available to an audience looking for slides and presentations, Scribd offers a way to make documents readily available for people looking for certain types of documents. It seemed worth an experiment.
Neil has opened my eyes to other ways to use Scribd. I agree with his observation that there’s a marketing potential to putting documents on Scribd. For example, if you put seminar handouts on Scribd, you give conference organizers looking for speakers a sample of your handout materials and might generate more speaking invitations.
The biggest benefit might be to build a new audience for articles that appeared in print to a limited audience or, in my example, for handout materials for presentations to small audiences.
In simplest terms, it creates another channel for your materials.
And it emails me with nice notes saying that people read and liked my articles.
Interesting site, and it’s in the Web 2.0 family. Neil gives you some other great ideas. Check out his post and Scribd.
While you are reading Neil’s post, take some time to check out the TechnoLawyer site and join up, and take a look at the TechnoLawyer NewsWire newsletter I’ve been writing for, where I give you some info about new legal tech products.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
Learn more about electronic discovery at Dennis Kennedy’s Electronic Discovery Resources page.
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