Federico Pistono

From the website:

Scribd is a free online library where anyone can upload.

And that's exactly what it is. Among its interesting features there is:

• "I Liked it!" feature à la digg
• Plain HTML essay with no annoying images and banners
• Completely Web 2.0
• Possibility to export the essay as a PDF, TXT, DOC, or MP3
• Similar authors, similar articles with % of relevance
• Usual siste statistics, most read today, all time, et cetera...
• Fullscreen mode
• Embeddable object, like an acrobat reader for PDF, but it uses flash.

As soon as I saw the MP3 possibility I was a bit suspicious, text-to-speech software tend to be pretty disappointing (waiting for Leopard...), but this one is pretty decent, a nice female voice with a slight British accent would read the essay for you.

I personally would have used the ODF file extension in place of the DOC, for a million reasons. Are you listening Scribd?

Update: Apparently they are listening, this is what they wrote me:

Hi Federico,


We plan to add ODF soon so that we will have both ODF and DOC. We agree that this will be a great addition. Thanks a lot for the feedback.

Internet can be very beneficial to some people. It can be use for a variety of means. We all know how YouTube is the most popular free video sharing website in the World. It has endless possibilities, millions of users and even more content. Though this opportunity is often misused. Low value content, dancing idiots, aroused teenagers showing themselves in front of a webcam and so on. If you randomly looked at 20 videos on YT you could think that it pretty well depicts the demise of human civilisation.

But this is not all that there is to it. YouTube has two of the most important factors of the Web 2.0 revolution.

0. Visibility: literally millions of users visiting the website everyday. That's not something you can find that often. If nobody reads your blog... it's like to having a blog, you could just write on your diary.
1. Democracy: at its true form. The cost of making a short video is close to nothing. A 50$ cellphone, a webcam, a second hand computer. All the original non-pornographic non-violent content is allowed. Politicians cannot and shall not put their dirty hands on what people have to say.

This presentation is very impressive. I have waited a long time for such a consistent and effective presentation about intellectual property and freedom in a modern view. There is no doubt that in the World as it exists today current laws for intellectual property and copyrights simply do not work.

The reality is that we are living a true revolution, new forms of expressions emerge from the old World. Re-editing, mixing, re-mixing of trailers, music, photographs, original works, textbooks, wikis, poems, films. Today anyone who has a computer or a Mac can democratically create art and distribute it without having to pass through the traditional media system.

Very cool animation presenting the Creative Commons ideas. Worth watching it, clearly explained, simple and direct approach.

From the video description: