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November 02, 2007

From forms to comedy

Docstoc.com is a free site to "find and share professional documents." Here's what the About page says:

Find a vast quantity of high quality legal, business, technology, educational, and creative documents for free. docstoc allows users to upload their documents for all the world to share.

In addition, users can store their documents in their own personal online folders for anytime, anywhere access.

My guess when I got the site was that they were aiming at letting people share useful forms and templates. And there are lots of them there. But it also has bunches of people using it as a self-publishing site. For example, click on the comedy category. Since there is a Comedy category, my initial assumption was wrong. In any case, since the site leaves itself wide open for how people want to use it, and provides a good set of tools for community filtering and organizing, it'll become whatever we want it to become. Who knows, maybe it'll become the go-to site for comedy forms.

Or, of course, it may never take on a particular use, in which case it's unlikely to succeed. Is it intending to be the YouTube of documents? In any case, for its openness, Creative Commons-ness, and folksonomosity, I wish it well.

PS: The FAQ notes that for now, there's no limit on how much space users can have for private storage of their own documents. How long before the first greedy person ruins it for the rest of us? [Tags: forms documents collaboration ]

Posted by D. Weinberger at November 2, 2007 08:22 AM


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