Got this idea last night, coded it up in a few hours. Code quality is terrible, was going for more of a proof of concept. Anyways, the overhead is pretty bad, BUT you can use things like <Insert social network here> now to store files. Although < Aforementioned social network> may mangle the UTF-8, so it may not work.

What is the benefit of this over uuencode or base64/base85 encoding to perform the same use?

Not much, only a few super niche cases I can think of, and you can also use yEnc, but this is cooler. :)