Scribd is a essentially a document publication platform. Launched in March 2007, it now boasts more words than Wikipedia, and is in the top 300 websites in the world. As a writer, there are two main ways you can use Scribd.

Publish on Scribd

Scribd is a kind of democratic library - anybody can self-publish their articles, essays and books. Creating an account is free and you can upload documents in a variety of formats. One thing I have noticed recently is that all documents are now crawled by search engine bots, so that the actual texts are now indexed including, of course, your links back to your site.

Scribd for Writing Ideas

There are also many books on Scribd, including many out of copyright, as well as research papers, transcripts and lengthy essays. If you are stuck for a writing idea and are tired of trawling the news feeds, then Scribd can be another source of inspiration.

iPaper, The Scribd Document Platform

Scribd could be just another document directory, but they have also developed their own document reader, iPaper. This is similar to Google's book reader and enables one single platform to read different document types. Just like YouTube, the iPaper can also be embedded into a website so that users can read the document without leaving your site.

Overall, I have found Scribd a good source of texts and a useful place to post polished lengthy articles. For full article see On Writing Online.