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.

Like many millions out there i’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail app.
I open gmail several times a day. I’ve tried a couple of Firefox extensions to improve gmail but never kept them for long.

I’ve always tried being a more organized person. I’ve tried several apps, pda’s, PIM’s and even webapps. But i’ve always failed miserably in using them for long.

One of the webapps that i had tried was RTM (Remember the Milk). I think it’s safe to say that it’s the leader of the todo-lists webapps. It has many integration features but i never took the time to explore it properly.

Recently RTM dev team lauched a firefox extension that integrates RTM into Gmail.
I didn’t jump on the early adopters bandwagon on this one. But after reading Gina Trapani’s review of the extension in Lifehacker i’ve downloaded and installed the extension.

I love the thing.. every time i open my gmail there it is, a beatiful list of all my tasks for the following days.
The only complaint is that it can’t be moved around, like an igoogle module. But hey, it’s free, it works and it keeps me organized.

You can download the extension here.