Document Sharing for Business Networking and Marketing

Business Thursday: Today a big part of doing business at the internet is about new contacts at the social web. A proven way to get in contact with prospects is by distributing useful information. Depending upon the business this may happen at general social networks and for b2b at particular business networking sites. For business networking some services have specialized explicitely in enabling the exchange of documents and to deliver relevant information. These services are as well value information sources as they are a place to distribute information and to collaborate on industry news and even to get content for blogs and websites by embedding documents.

A popular services for document sharing and collaboration as well as for generating leads by distributing information is Docstoc.com. There is a comprehensive service offer to exhange documents and even forms. The service is stuffed with a search engine to find related information and assorts documents by rubrics. Documents may become shared at blogs and websites.

Scribd is another already popular service with features to embed documents at third party sites. There is a broad range of categories available. Scribd has started to feature most popular documents lately at a site named Topics.

The edocr service is rather b2b oriented. The service is still in alpha mode with categories on construction, finance and government. The service encourages to upload documents, to collaborate on case studies and white papers and to promote a business.

New launched services are Issuu, a publishing and sharing hybrid, ThinkFree Docs by the collaboration and project management platform ThinkFree and WePapers, a document sharing and collaboration platform for scientific papers.

Co Browsing and Information Management by Online Annotations and Notes

This is the fourth part and for now the last part of the co browsing software and tools series. At this article annotation tools and information sharing services with sticky notes at third party websites are introduced.

Online annotation services enable to share information about a site either by a social networking community or by sticky notes at websites. There are annotation services strictly for sticky notes and others are real social networks. The way these services do work is most different, too. Usually there is a browser plugin necessary to make annotations, but the information sharing can happen in completely different ways. As diverse as the services work so are the purposes they may be used for. But at all online annotation services are closer to clickstreams and used for information sharing even in a professional way opposite to co browsing with chat.

At first there are the social networks, where Diigo is probably known best and the service with the most features. Diigo works by a browser extension. It enables to make sticky notes and to share these notes by different means. Information can be tagged and there are buzz and top lists. To find like minded people and relevant information the service is stuffed with a recommendation engine. It is a real research and information sharing service, which is offering particular conditions to educators. Another annotation service that works with a browser extension is Fleck. Fleck enables social notes and information sharing.

Reframe It offers two different way to share information and to make annotations. This may either happen by a plugin or within the community. When browsing from within the community the information will appear within a sidebar. Too, collected information and annotations may be shared by emailing a link.

Another way of sharing information about a website is by citing it. kwout is a tool to share whole websites or citing parts of it. For sharing members get an own website or can post the citations to other social networks. Quotations are also a feature of SharedCopy.com. Annotations and quotes may be shared with others and posted to other social networks. A further step beyond does ShiftSpace. It is an open source software that even enables to change the look of a website for sharing.

Last but not least there are collaboratiion tools. A.nnotate and Stixy do enable to make annotations to uploaded documents, that may be changed or complemented by co workers.

There are a couple of further tools that have been reviewed lately at FOLDEN.INFO. If you are interested in these have a look at information management.