WriteWith is a simple, free (for now, anyway) online document editing program, which has incredible potential for journalists, educators and anyone who collaborates.
Here's the description of the creation/intent:
"Most of Writewith got built in the last 6 weeks, but it’s been a few years in coming. One of us cofounders, Martin Goldman, started out wanting to solve a big problem — the student newspaper at SUNY Binghamton, Pipe Dream, would sometimes accidentally publish the wrong versions of articles. At the end of a hard night at the copy desks, editors would lose track of which Word document drafts on their computer desktops were the final drafts."
I tried it, using a brownie recipe from yesterday's NY Times (a spectacular recipe, I might add). It worked like a dream: upload the original draft; edit; output new document in a variety of formats from MS Word doc format to blog entry to pdf (yep! FREE pdf creation!).
Collaboration: the future of the internet!
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5 comments:
Serena,
I find it very interesting that every major software manufacturer, Tom, Dick and Harry seem to have come up with some sort of manuscript tracking software. Am I nuts (BTW, does the brownie recipe use these?), or maybe just neurotic... but, I just seem to use the "details" view of my working doc folders and check to see what time a manuscript was last saved. Maybe I can see the confusion from a newsroom perspective... but it all comes down to organization and clear communication, right?
:-)
A-M
Ditto to what a-m said.
Our original Danish newspaper publishing software sent the message, "Don't worry about finding out where stories are in the workflow; the computer will track that for you."
Then folks (including me) started thinking we didn't have to talk with each other; the computer would do it for us.
Not true.
Any collaboration software has to be transparent enough for people to see exactly where a file has been and who did what to it; and it has to make sure folks still talk.
Wikipedia seems to encourage that, though I haven't gone deep there.
Another two thoughts:
Sounds like Writewith understands my concerns. "track everybody's actions with a comprehensive history."
Now the next challenge: create tracking/revision software that works on visual changes, like for full pages. We don't have that now at work. File size would be a major hurdle, unless the software made a bunch of very small pdfs along the way, which were expandable to view small changes if necessary.
More on the process behind the development of writewith .
Glitchy fingers.
Previous posting should link to Newsweek.
You can try clicking on the period there or try
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