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Seven Document Formats Worse than Scribd

The other day while searching for some LaTeX information I came across this page on Scribd, and I was reminded once again how much I loathe this website. If you aren’t familiar with it, Scribd is a site which hosts various books, articles, and other documents. For reasons that are an impenetrable mystery to me, these people have decided that the way to bring together potentially many different formats of print media is to turn them all into shockwave flash. As in, this beautifully typeset LaTeX document, compiled to PDF, was turned into a scrollable flash…thing. Combine this with the rather sorry state of flash on Linux, and you get just about my least favorite website on the entire intertubes. Just getting it in a Google search makes me almost as mad as getting a link to Experts Exchange.

So, to keep my blood pressure down, I put things into perspective for myself by making a list of seven document formats Scribd could have chosen to use, but didn’t.

1. Upon request, print the document out and mail it to the users, preferably from a distribution center somewhere in Africa.
2. Put each word from the document in a Web 2.0-esque cloud visualization where the size of each tag reflects the relative frequency of the word’s occurrence.
3. Save the document as a series of images. Upload these to Facebook. When a user requests the document, tag the user in all of those pictures so that he/she can view them.
4. Offer RealPlayer streaming videos of somebody slowly scrolling through the document.
5. Record someone reading the document, set it to soothing piano music with a psychedelic visualization, and submit it to YouTube in a series of 10-minute segments.
6. Ask the user for his/her phone number. Split the document into 140-byte chunks and send them sequentially as SMS messages.
7. Write out the document in 1:1000 scale on the ground using large rocks. Then provide links to the appropriate Google Map coordinates.

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