I have a dilemma!
http://www.scribd.com/ |
www.dropbox.com |
Scribd Vs Drop Box
When looking for a suitable platform to share documents with any reader passing by. I have to say I plonked for the first one I came across which was scribd. It has done the job quite nicely up until now and has some pretty nifty features. When I started uploading documents I really didn’t expect anyone to actually take an interest and read them Lesson Number One Learnt.
I suppose I put them on the blog for my own reference more than wanting to share. My blog is a bit of a home page for me, anyway I am naturally untidy, my desktop looks like WWIII has broken out on it and I can never find what I want when I need to. So uploading documents was a bit of a tidy up of the desktop getting rid of all the unwanted icons exercise.
I suppose I put them on the blog for my own reference more than wanting to share. My blog is a bit of a home page for me, anyway I am naturally untidy, my desktop looks like WWIII has broken out on it and I can never find what I want when I need to. So uploading documents was a bit of a tidy up of the desktop getting rid of all the unwanted icons exercise.
Due to not doing my homework properly this is what I hadn’t realised until recently. Anyone who wants to download and print the document they are reading needs to sign up for an account I am not sure I want to put readers of the documents through that performance. It didn’t matter really as I didn’t think many people would read and there goes my 2nd failure of research.
Scribd has a stat counter on it which tells you exactly how many times a document has been read. Yesterday I nearly fell of my seat 1’014 reads of the 29 documents available the most popular being T-I-A PC Minutes for April 2012 with 274 reads, which is a really useful stat to have as it shows people do take an interest and read about what is happening locally.
So what’s this got to do with drop box another document sharing application. Well its quite simple if the reader of the document wants to download and print as long as they have PDF (as I save my documents to PDF) they can download and print without having to have an account.
I am now torn between having the stats and being able to prove people are interested in what’s going on locally and the do use the internet or providing an easy uncomplicated service for my readers without the nifty how many reads feature of Scribd.
Decisions Decisions ;-)