I have to be honest here, I’ve never heard of Scribd before reading this article at GigaOM, and it go my attention.

All started with good old paper, you could write on it or use a typewrite, you could print or draw, it’s versatile and cheap, and has been the standard medium for document sharing and distribution.

But since the dawn of computing people have been storing electronic documents in hundreds of different formats. Either text, audio and pictures you’ll find different applications to create such files, and most of these applications created their own closed file format.

Microsoft has been playing a key role in the format standardization with it’s Office package creating some of the most popular file formats like DOC and XLS files. Acrobat created PDF files to put and end to the file format issue, it helped, but didn’t resolve the problem.

Scribd emerged last year with that same idea, but with a different approach. Instead of creating yet another file format, they created a web service for text files. The key stone of the service is that each text file can be shared, viewed and downloaded without any special plugin or tool. That’s what Scribd call iPaper, and it looks quite nice.

A few days ago they’ve upgraded their document viewer to enable it to be faster and lighter and to even include ads on your documents.

Personally I’ll still be using Google Documents for online collaboration and document sharing, but it’s nice to see some innovative ideas in this area.

These past couple of weeks have been rich in events. CES in Las Vegas and now MacWorld.

But on the sidelines of these big mass gathering events there always something that goes horribly wrong. The major mishap at CES last week was when TV’s started to turn off magically. Some guy then proceeded to turn it back on, just to watch it go off again a couple of seconds later.

The prank by itself has no major consequences, except annoying those working at the booths. But when someone takes responsibility for such prank,publishes the incriminating evidence on video and confess to the whole thing on their website, things get out of control fast.

The culprits got banned from the event and even tried to explain themselves by referring to the whole incident as journalism.
Nobody cared. That’s what happened during the Gizmodo coverage of CES.

I’ve personally did similar stuff during computer expo’s that I’ve attended. To my defense I was young and was there as an anonymous guy.

The consequences were none and the thrill of misbehaving was huge. So I truly understand what motivated Gizmodo guys to do that kind of silly stuff.

The consequences for Gizmodo were on the contrary quite different. Not only were they banned from CES but they got virtually crucified by every blogger and news outlet across the globe.

Sometimes I like to use the old gray matter for a change, and I got thinking about this incident. Nobody talked about Endgadget coverage of CES, but everyone is talking about Gizmodo. Bad publicity is better than no publicity.

Do you agree with my theory that this was all a setup to enable Gizmodo to stand out from the crowd, or was just a prank?

I’ve debated over this issue many times. Does the average user needs a server at home?
Microsoft thinks so, and it’s pushing it’s Windows Home Server to answer that question once and for all.

Some power users already have servers at home, usually a older pc that is now running some flavor of linux in the shadows.
I personally felt the need for a home server several time already and i’m really thinking of using a laptop as my workstation and housing all my files at a server. But i’m yet to take this leap of faith.

The explosion on the usage of laptops and other mobile gadgets able to play rich media makes this option very appealing. Watching a movie that sits in the server while you’re in bed watching it on your laptop is a huge selling point.
Besides I expect to see this product integrating perfectly with the Xbox 360 which already sits in many living rooms across the world.

I’m in no way a Microsoft zealot but this is a great move at the right time. And the campaign serves a double purpose. First it educates the masses to the possible uses of home servers and most importantly it’s very catchy and simple.

Via (Laughing Squid)