I was talking the other day to a friend of mine recently starting his own company when he asked me the following fairly innocuous question:

How do I e-mail a PowerPoint presentation while protecting it?

My friend merely wanted to protect his intellectual property. Fair enough, although I told him that just about every means of locking down a document could be circumvented one way or another. But why the focus on email?

Stop thinking about old tools like e-mail.

Instead, why not put it on your site via Scribd, set desired permissions, and draw people to your new (and content-challenged) site? They may actually stay there and share that presentation—and others—with people in their tribes. You may get discovered by others. Who knows what will happen? Not me.

Simon Says

To the web-challenged, here’s some unsolicited advice: Stop thinking about old tools like e-mail. Start thinking web. It’s not going anywhere.