benmurray / washington d.c.

The YouTube for Documents

It’s about time someone found a better way to display documents online. Several companies have tried it, but Scribd gets it right this time around. Previously, websites linked to PDFs, Word documents and other files that one would have to wait and download, find the file on their computer and open it up in their slow word processor or take a coffee break while Acrobat fires up.

Scribd uses Flash technology to stream the document straight into a website, embedded right in with the rest of the content. You can share documents with embed code just like YouTube, email it to a friend, zoom in, flip through pages and see all the pages at once.

It has great potential for government websites and research organizations that have thousands of files and manuals that visitors must download and labor through. Using the Scribd Platform, they can even convert the entire collection of documents at once and share them instantly. Free from the chains of outdated and clunky government websites, these documents are searchable and placed in context with similar documents…all automatically. If only agencies would move quickly enough and adopt the new method.

Best of National Geographic: Pictures of the Year

Freedom to Tinker with eVoting Machines?

Microsoft‘s recent bid to acquire Yahoo!, I was looking around to find out where the anti-Microsoft folks from 1998 have ended up. They were witnesses, journalists, economists, congressmen, etc. One was Ed Felten, a professor at Princeton. He has a blog (“Freedom to Tinker“). And he found something interesting recently.

He found two sets of unattended, electronic voting machines at Princeton. It is well documented that these machines can be tinkered with to affect the vote outcome. Proponents of the machines assure they are always well-protected to prevent this from happening. Apparently, not so much.