Scribd

I just came across a new (to me) Web 2.0 tool called Scribd. I was looking for an article on the use of w20 in formal educational settings and found one on Google. The link returned a document which was viewable online. It had some interactive tools to manage the viewing experience, but I did not pay it much attention until I clicked on the download button. I was presented with a screen to login and realized I was actually using a new tool. Scribd allowed me to sign in with my already existing Facebook account, and the download commenced.

After a little research, I discovered that Scribd is the self-proclaimed largest social publishing and reading website. The informational tutorial states that over 50 million users are subscribing, commenting, embedding, rating, and reading on the go every month. I dug a little further and this truly seems to be an amazing HTML 5 compliant tool. I just participated in a web-based meeting with over 10 people located across the country to defend my internship. I had to email each participant a copy of the report and the .pptx slides so they could follow along. This meant each person had to print the report and powerpoint slides to follow along (we did use WebEx but it was cumbersome). With Scribd I could have presented both in a format viewable online without any modifications or additional work. Since it is HTML5 compliant, there would have been no loss in formatting or fonts. Pretty cool.