The great thing about the Internet is that there are so many ways in which you can easily gain your 15 minutes of fame. Whether you post a video to Youtube, create your own website, or sign up for Facebook,  you can get yourself out there easily and for free.

The same goes for publishing  PDF files. For this, there’s Scribd.

Huh? Scrib-what?

 If you haven’t  heard about it, here’s a section quoted from the website:

 “Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read.  With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.”

Now although this statement may sound a bit paradoxical when you think about it in terms of your own protected PDF files,  it may be just what you‘re looking for if you need to get some PDF content out on there on the Internet.

Scribd is a convenient online publishing resource that’s basically a collection of uploaded user content that can range anywhere from sheet music and poetry to health reports and political essays.

And unlike most online sites and services, you don’t need to sign up  for an account to publish your documents. You can publish them anonymously. However, in doing so you’ll be forfeiting any ownership over the posted material.

By signing up with a Scribd account, you can specify copyright licenses for your material.  In addition, because linking in documents is prohibited, having an account is also a way of posting up your contact information for viewers interested in the files you’ve uploaded. 

Getting Online Exposure

In terms of online exposure, the files that are uploaded are indexed by major search engines, such as Google, with a designated public URL.  Also, documents are organized by categories, tags, ratings and reviews, which make your documents easily accessible in a variety of ways on the Scribd website itself.

This accessibility also extends to file formats. The PDF content  published on Scribd can be automatically converted and made available in other digital formats (.doc, .ppt, xls, .txt, .jpg, .gif, etc.).  You can  even convert  other documents you want to view and download into the PDF format. 

The fun part about this site is that it’s a social network. As a user community, Scribd has the usual networking bells and whistles— RSS feeds, emailing and messaging features, the ability to bookmark and flag your favourites, spaces for adding groups and friends, and even shareable options for digg, reddit, stumbleupon, and del.icio.us.

It’s a publishing service, user community and content resource centre in one. 

Check out  Scribd for yourself.