I’ve been looking at Scribd recently as a way of distributing documents online. Think of it as a kind of YouTube for documents – upload a document (Word, PDF, OpenDoc, RTF etc), tag it, choose a Creative Commons license if you so desire, and it gets converted into FlashPaper and is viewable online. You then get a snippet of code, allowing you to embed documents in your own site like this:
..and the original file remains untouched and available for download.
As an example, I took a PDF that was languishing on a server, and had been unread for a couple of years. Within an hour of being on Scribd, it had been indexed by Google and looked at by 12 people. Not bad.
I know this sounds like an advert, but I’m really rather impressed by it!