Welcome to the "Most Interesting Hard Drive" Contest!

This contest is our search for the most interesting new unpublished content out there, and we’re betting a MacBook Air and other great prizes that we can find it!

Everyone has hundreds - if not thousands - of documents sitting on their hard drives. Scribd's mission is to help you unlock this information by making it really easy to publish it online. This "Most Interesting Hard Drive" contest turns this mission into a game. We will keep track of the most popular over a specified period of time, and the participant with the most popular documents will win!

How does it work?

To register for the contest, you must first have a valid Scribd account. If you aren’t yet registered on Scribd, you can click here to sign up for free.

When you register for the Contest, we’ll give you a special ‘contest account.’ Upload as much new stuff to your contest account as you can, and at the end of the contest, the three participants with the most number of total views will be declared the winner!

Here are the three great prizes:

• First Prize: MacBook Air
• Second Prize: Amazon Kindle
• Third Prize: iPod Nano

Registration opens on May 5, 2008. Contest participants can register and upload new documents from May 5 all the way though the end of the contest on June 16, 2008. We will start counting document views on May 12, 2008 and continue through the end of the contest on June 16.

Submission rules:

• Your submissions may be in the the following formats:
  • doc, docx
  • xls, xlsx
  • pdf, ps
  • txt, rtf
  • open office formats
• Entries submitted in jpg, gif, tiff, or png format will be disqualified
• You must be able to prove that the content submitted for the Contest is owned by the you, is licensed for sharing on Scribd via a Creative Commons or similar license, or is in the public domain.
• Submissions must convert to iPaper and successfully display on the Scribd.com website. Documents that fail to convert will be disqualified (but this shouldn't happen very often).
• Submissions may not include obscene, lewd, hateful, or pornographic images
• You may not submit documents for the Contest that you've previously published on Scribd.com prior to the start of the contest

What's the best strategy to win the contest?

First, you need to upload a lot of really interesting content that people will like. Here's some examples:

• Your old school work from high school or college. You would be surprised how many people find this content useful once it gets indexed by Scribd's search and other search engines like Google.
• Business and legal documents you have collected over the years. Most professionals have tons of these on their hard drives, and millions of people search for these kinds of documents every day.
• Public domain content. Lots of people have all sorts of ebooks, scanned texts, and other kinds of documents in the public domain that are just collecting dust on their hard drives. This will work best if it's public domain content that doesn't already appear on the internet.
• Funny and entertaining stuff. Do you have some of those funny email chain letters sitting around or a slideshow of hilarious images? If one of these documents becomes really popular, it can help you win!
• Any other documents that are interesting, such as a story you wrote, a PowerPoint presentation you made, or a useful spreadsheet your friend sent you. For a longer list of ideas, check out this list

Second, you need to promote your content. Here's how:

• Link to it from your blog, website, MySpace page, or Facebook profile.
• Submit it to a link filter site, like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Del.icio.us. If some of your content becomes a hit on Digg, it can bring you hundreds of thousands of views!
• Email it to your friends or embed it in other websites.
• Share it on Scribd, by sending it to your friends or adding it to groups. Scribd has a vibrant community who will check out your content and help promote it for you.
• Get it indexed by search engines. One of the best sources of traffic to your docs is traffic from search engines like Google. The best way to get this kind of traffic is to upload content that is rich in valuable text that doesn't already appear on the internet.