I've just been checking out a new content sharing service that looks really good. The system is called eSnips from the same company that brought you Net Snippets (which was written up in Gearhead a couple of years ago).

An eSnips subscription gets you 1G-byte of storage, which you can use as completely private storage for just yourself or make available to a select group or even to the entire world.

The eSnips Web-based user interface allows you to upload any local files you please to the any of your folders (you can create and name as many as you please) and the optional client-side "uploader" program for Windows will batch upload files in the background.

Actually the uploader does far more than upload - it also provides a screen capture facility that uploads screen images to eSnips as well as the ability to capture and upload whole or part of a Web page displayed in IE, Netscape, Firefox, or Mozilla.

The stuff that you save to eSnips can be "free" tagged (there appears to be a dirty words filter in use so things appear to be quite civilized) and you can give other people access to your folders (invitations are sent in e-mail messages with URLs to gain access).

You can invite people to search, browse, download files and make comments. You can also invite others to access your content and upload files. ESnips will even notify you by e-mail once a day when a new file is added to one of your folders, a comment is posted, or when a file you have uploaded is viewed - and if you have installed the eSnips uploader the notifications can be sent as pop-ups.

It will be interesting to see where this service goes. So far, there's no advertising and no indication of how Net Snippets plans to make money. Perhaps corporate services are in the works...

To get a quick overview of what eSnips can do take the tour or simply sign up - it is free so there's no risk.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.