Using WRITEBOARD, a Web-Based Collaborative Document Authoring Tool

by Dennis D. McDonald

Jeremiah Owyang and I recently co-authored a “white paper” titled “Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New ‘Web 2.0’ Tools.” For joint authoring we used the “Writeboard” web based collaborative authoring system. This article describes our experience.

Jeremiah is in California and I’m in Virginia. I’ve published the paper here on my blog and Jeremiah has done so on his own blog.

This was my first time using a collaborative tool like Writeboard. Here’s the Writeboard website: http://www.writeboard.com. All you have to do is create a free account, post the initial text, create a password controlled group of authorized users, then people in different locations can edit and compare versions of the text using a standard web browser over the Internet.

The Writeboard system keeps track of individual document versions by apparently creating a separate addressable file whenever you click the “save” button. Text is displayed on the left side of the screen and a list of the dated and numbered versions (Jeremiah and I got up to 47 — we clicked the “save” button a lot!) is kept on the right side of the screen. When you select two versions of the document the system will compare the two and display differences with color highlighting.

The interface is not entirely WYSIWYG. Display formatting can be toggled back and forth between plain text and a semi-WISIWYG display with plain, bold and italic display. For our purposes, though, that worked just fine as we could concentrate almost totally on content.

The Writeboard system makes it easy to export and email any version of the document in plain text or HTML. I cannot say how good the security of the system is or whether one would want to use this for collaborative authoring of a document that contained confidential information. Nor do I understand the business model; this service is free and I didn’t see any ads during the course of our little project. I was accessing the document via either a Windows XP laptop, a Windows 2000 laptop, or a Macintosh running OS-X.

In summary, Writeboard works well with two people working on a document. I can’t say how well it would work with more people involved or with a document that required a more complex character set or the inclusion of multiple images. But I will definitely use the service again.

Comments

[Jeremiah Owyang]

I'm glad you liked the tool Dennis, I also use tadalists for chores around the house...wife and I share it.

It was very rewarding working on this whitepaper with you, wow we had a LOT of revisions.

Writeboard is a 'killerap' in my opinion...one of my favorites

Jeremiah Owyang

[Dennis D. McDonald]

A couple days after I wrote this entry I also started using Writely, another collaborative writing tool ( http://www.writely.com/ ). The feature set appears somewhat richer than Writeboard, but the interface seems to be a bit less intuitive. I'll post more later.

[kathleen fasanella]

I've been using writely. It's interface is more robust although it still needs some work (right click doesn't work). It may just be a browser issue -I'm running firefox w/select extensions. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it considering I can access documents in process from any of the three computers I use on a regular basis.

[Dennis D. McDonald]

Another option is SocialText ( http://www.socialtext.com ) which applies wiki technology to group collaboration. This is from the SocialText web page: "The Quickest Way to Get Everyone on the Same Page: Socialtext is the first wiki company and market leader in enterprise wiki solutions. Over 200 global organizations use Socialtext to accelerate project cycles and help groups communicate more effectively than with email, while fostering trust, transparency and group memory.."

[Mvenuss]

Recently in Spain held a demonstration called Operation Teddy in which states that downloading music from the Internet is not a crime.The protesters gathered at the headquarters of the General Society of Authors and Editors of Spain (SGAE), using megaphones, laptops and posters announcing that in that space was downloading music from the Internet as part of the protest.The main purpose of this demonstration is to show that sharing files over the network means to promote freedom and technical knowledge, and should not be subject to copyright laws. The name "Operation Teddy" was because the group of protesters downloaded a song by Teddy Bautista, called Get On Your CNES.According to Xavier, a member of a group of hackers Metabolik laboratory belonging to the states "We claim the free flow of culture and technique against the digital divide that produce the lords of the copyright. A sustained breach of the outdated cultural industry and copy laws. "Is it validates the idea that downloading music and files from the Internet, is only one way to encourage technological culture?

[zopspovw]

The new distribution channel consisting in offering downloadable movies over the Internet is consolidating. Seems to begin to overcome the fears that the producers have had to this way of distributing content, in part, thanks to new anti-piracy systems (DRM), and partly I guess because of the successes already harvested by the Apple i-Tunes , through which has been offering legal downloads of music and later TV series. i-Tunes has demonstrated that this new form of distribution is not only a cost effective solution, but is destined to become the way to provide content for the future.In the United States already offers the service of Internet movie downloads such as Movielink and CinemaNow. The latter recently has added to its services from that after you download the movie burned to DVD for viewing on any player (even the titles offered are mediocre).