When a group of college students launched the document-sharing Web site Scribd.com, they envisioned it as a place where they and others could publish term papers online.
Scribd, which allows anyone to upload documents much like YouTube lets users post videos online, has grown quickly since its September 2006 debut. Users have added more than 350,000 documents in various languages, ranging from instructions for solving a Rubik's Cube to the sheet music from Johann Sebastian Bach's "Ave Maria." Groups dedicated to sharing everything from Federal Communications Commission reports to Japanese comic books have sprung up.
But rivaling Scribd's growing collection of schoolwork, public documents and other miscellanea is a significant amount of adult content, which the start-up has taken pains to downplay while it decides whether the explicit material will stay or go. As other Internet destinations that rely on user-generated content have learned -- from photo-sharing sites like Flickr to video sites like YouTube and Veoh -- keeping the site "clean" while not alienating users is a central challenge.
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