Well, I had to test Scribd with something. Why not use a document on the Massachusetts Life Sciences Industry?
Scribd is sort of like the YouTube of electronic paper. I found Scribd from TomJoe's post about Life on Mars. His PowerPoint talk is really much more interesting than the life science document that I uploaded as a test, but since you're here anyway, you might as well take a look.
What does Scribd do?
It solves the "waiting for another application to open" problem that I find so frustrating when I want to quickly read (okay, skim) a pdf document that's linked from something on the web. One of my web browsers (Safari) has decided that all pdfs are really Quick Time movies in disguise and presents them as such. My other web browser (FireFox) simply downloads the documents without any kind of feedback loop to notify me that the download has happened or where it went.
Scribd lets me see the document in the web page and decide for myself if I want to enlarge it or download it. It's also fast. Yeah! No more losing years of my life while waiting for Acrobat Reader to launch.
Give it a try. The subject matter may only interest a few of you, but the method for presenting it (Scribd) will interest more.
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Maybe you should add the "pdf download" and "download status bar" add-ons to firefox. And don't forget Zotero.
Another helpful firefox add-on is biobar.
I guess I missed pointing out my main reason for liking this presentation.
I really like being able to read and view documents without all the extra work of having to download them, read them and then find and delete them afterwards.
Thanks once again for the hat-tip, much appreciated. And I'm with you, it's nice to be able to view PDF's without having to wait for Adobe and/or downloading them. I stumbled upon Scribd as I was trying to find a way to get my presentation onto the web. Google Docs won't let you share documents without invitations (or at least I couldn't find an easy way to do it), so I couldn't make the seminar available to everyone. So I would have had to either had a server of my own that I could host it on (Blogger won't do that) or find some other alternative. Scribd is that alternative. It's a nice site, and like you stated, could really could wind up being sort of the YouTube for academia-related enterprises.