Crocodoc offers two plans: Free and Pro. To an extent, the Free version feels like a souped-up demo. You can upload and share documents, as well as mark up your files and share comments, for free. However, features like protecting a document with a password and managing document histories are only available on Pro accounts. The price tag isn’t too bad, though — a Pro plan is $8 per month, or $36 per year.

Technically, you don’t even need to create an account to use Crocodoc, providing you’re only interested in using the Free version. You can upload a document immediately from the home page and use all the mark up and sharing tools without going through any sort of registration process. The only time you’re prompted to open an account is if you want to password-protect your document. If you’re looking for a fast solution to get feedback on a document, Crocodoc is particularly useful. You will need to ensure you bookmark any documents you create on a free plan, however, because you won’t be able to find them again without the unique URL assigned to each document when you upload it.

When you’re reading a document through Crocodoc, you can highlight or strike out text. You can also add sticky notes that are linked to specific phrases or sections, as well as mark up a document with red text to the point that you bring back memories of school and your teacher’s red pen. The controls are easy to use, reminding me somewhat of Adobe Acrobat’s mark up tools. As far as sharing documents go, it’s a matter of passing along the file’s URL to your readers. Once they click on that link, they can comment on the document. They can also download a copy of the original. Unfortunately, if you’re using a Free account, anyone with the link can access the document. If you are working with even slightly sensitive material, you’d best upgrade to a Pro account.

Pro accounts offer enhanced security with SSL encryption. Accessing a document on Crocodoc seems to be dependent on the password, meaning that anyone you share a document with does not need to create an individual account. Crocodoc also offers the option of creating an intranet deployment behind your firewall if you’re sharing documents with your colleagues and want the best possible security.

What tools do you use for document collaboration?

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How best to approach the issue, though? I’ve found that some people can very easily get their back up when attempts are made to point out their spelling and grammar weaknesses. Maybe it feels too much like being reprimanded in school. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as the famous flying nanny once said, and the same sentiment applies with grammar, too.

Start Early

If you establish a precedent early on of just accepting the work someone’s handing you, and then making corrections yourself before handing it off to someone else (assuming this isn’t part of your job description, of course), then it will be much, much harder to break this bad habit down the road.

If it isn’t too late, then start sending work back immediately. This can be hard to do when there are significant time constraints on a project, or when there’s pressure from the next link in the chain to get their hands on something, but if you can build in a revision loop early on in the cycle, higher-ups will ultimately be happier, and those before you in the process might actually improve with time, rather than repeating errors to a degree that’s absolutely maddening.

Be Direct

You won’t help anyone by being passive aggressive about spelling and grammar problems. Chances are that the offending party is fully aware that they need help, but they’ve never before encountered anyone willing to address the problem head on, and have managed to coast by accordingly.

After an initial period of discomfort, most people will actually respond positively to constructive criticism about their flaws in this area. Most likely, these problems have plagued them for a long time, and they haven’t ever been told how to go about fixing them, they’ve just been told they’re doing it wrong. Pairing criticism with helpful advice about how to improve is key.

There are also numerous Internet resources you can point people to, which can act as crib sheets. Perhaps most painless among these tools, since they’re also pretty funny, are The Oatmeal‘s comics. Some of the comics deal specifically with common errors in spelling and punctuation, and as an added bonus the rest of the site is pretty hilarious, too, so even though you’ll be chastising someone by sending out a link, you’ll also sort of be rewarding them.

Explain

Being told that something is wrong will make you aware of your error in that instance, but it won’t necessarily do anything to curb future bad behavior and repeated mistakes. If people know why a mistake they are making is wrong, then it becomes much easier to avoid it in the future, since it will make sense not to do it.

I still have to expand the contraction “it’s” to ensure that I’m using it right. Pointing out that it’s only correct to use it when you can substitute “it is” without changing the meaning of the sentence will go a long way to helping people avoid that specific error. Likewise, explaining the logic behind other common grammar and spelling errors will also prove helpful.

Results Take Time

None of the above are quick fixes, and you’ll have to feel out how far you can take things with specific individuals. The important thing with correcting these kinds of common mistakes is staying consistent, and not letting things slide. Once you begin just accepting that cleaning up flaws will be your job, it will become your job, even if it’s not something you’re being paid to do.

How do you go about getting others to improve their spelling and grammar?

Photo by Flickr user alkruse24, licensed under CC BY 2.0

But how to go about enlisting that kind of help, especially without spending a sizable amount on professional editing services? I’ll let you in on a little secret: You don’t need a pro to help you improve, and you don’t need to be a pro to help others.

Facebook Notes

I think the least-used Facebook feature is its Notes. The neglect is probably due to the fact that most of what people want to convey to an audience of Facebook associates can be communicated via wall posts, comments and status updates. But the Facebook note is a valuable resource that has a variety of different applications, including as a sounding board for your writing.

A lot of my writer friends use this method for soliciting opinions and responses to their work. They’ll post a short piece, or a section of a longer work, as a note, and then tag people who they know will either enjoy reading it, or who’ll provide honest criticism in the form of comments or privately via a Facebook message. And even if your work doesn’t elicit any kind of feedback, you haven’t lost anything and you’re basically in the same place as if you’d never looked for outside help to begin with.

Google Wave

Facebook is a limited audience, in some respects, but for some people posting notes just isn’t a viable options, since controlling access isn’t all that simple. Google Wave, on the other hand, can provide a way to share work around a much more limited audience, and in an environment that’s ripe for collaboration.

Now I’m not a great fan of Wave, but it isn’t all bad. It has some great potential for doing collaborative work, and now that invites are plentiful and easy to be had (in fact, let me know in the comments if you need one, I have 20 as of this writing), you should have no problem getting other friends who need help with their writing on board.

Start a group of like-minded people who could use a second set of eyes on the work they produce, and devote a Wave or two to sharing each other’s work. Some might prefer an informal arrangement, but I’ve found it works best when people take turns sharing work they want looked at, instead of just posting stuff as they create it, since that can lead to an imbalance in work load if left unchecked.

Pen Pals

Sometimes the best collaborative arrangement is a well-honed and well-matched partnership. The best way to go about finding a useful editorial partnership is contacting someone whose work you enjoy (and ideally, who you have a preexisting relationship with) and hammering out an arrangement by which you both mutually benefit.

This system often works best if you keep reading relatively light to begin with, make generous allowances for each other’s busy schedules, but still follow up if you haven’t heard anything in a while. It’s also probably not a bad idea to establish a regular interval for email exchanges, say a week at the outside.

The Golden Rule of Peer Review

I’ll leave you with the most important rule of all in peer review: Invest yourself personally in the work that you do, but distance yourself entirely from the product you end up with. That is to say, write like your life depends on it, but don’t take any criticism personally. Criticism is food for the writer, and remember, you can always disagree with anything anyone says against your work, although you should never do so outright.

How do you get feedback on your writing?

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Revizr is a new app that combines wiki elements with change tracking features that preserves the integrity of your original document, so you can see exactly what your collaborators have added (or taken away) from your copy. And it does so in an app that’s so easy to use, you’re actually using it the moment you visit its homepage for the first time. In order to manipulate your own documents, and work together with others, you will have to sign up, but if you’re just looking for a taste of what Revizr can do before you enroll, the trial is the site itself.

If you want to dig a little deeper, sign-up is quick, free and easy. Just pick a username, enter a password and an email address, and you’re ready to go. Alternatively, you can sign in using your OpenID credentials (including Yahoo and Gmail email addresses) and skip registration that way. Once logged in, you’ll have access to stored documents and be able to upload new ones. Revizr works with .doc/.docx, .odt, .rtf, HTML and .txt files. You can also cut and paste or compose a brand-new document using Revizr’s built-in word processor, which allows graphics, tables and pretty much anything else you’d expect a word processor to be able to handle.
For each document, you can set an access policy that allows you to specify who can view and make changes to the work in question. There are three options, which include people who already have access (who could be no one besides yourself), people who have the protected link (which you can generate and distribute from the permissions page), or anyone on the Internet. (There could be some creative potential with that option, maybe.) You can also set levels of access for new users, and allow them to see edits done by others, check previous versions, and even control content like an administrator.

What I like best about Revizr’s user control system is that it is incredibly simple, and yet very powerful, if you need it to be. There are only six options total, in two categories, and yet I can’t think of anything I’d add or change.

Users can also opt to “follow” documents, which sounds like (and probably is) a term borrowed from Twitter. All it really means is that if anyone makes changes to documents you’re following, you’ll receive email notifications of what’s been done. By default, you’ll automatically follow changes to any document you upload or create yourself. This is another feature I really appreciate. It’s something that should be a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how often something like this isn’t included. Working with only one other person, the need for it isn’t particularly great, but if you have a larger group, you risk some people missing entire versions without it.
Possibly Revizr’s weakest point is how it handles the actual editing itself. I tested it out by making some changes to my own document as an anonymous user while logged out, and I found the experience frustrating. It’s unclear where the cursor is. There are three icons (one  to insert text, one for commenting, and one for inserting a paragraph) but the choice of which to click isn’t very intuitive. Selecting and removing text works well enough, though, if that’s all you want to do.

Viewing of revisions could also have been better executed, in my opinion. Deleted text is represented as a strikeout, which works, but text additions are displayed in the margin with an arrow indicating where they fit in. It’s clumsy and hard to read, especially when keeping the additions in the main body of the document wouldn’t seem to have been that difficult.

As a free tool, Revizr gets the job done and has some nice backend features. Because of the limitations of the editor and change display, I wouldn’t personally go in for the paid versions, which start at $29 per month and range up to $99.

Have you tried Revizr? Did you find working with the editor frustrating?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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I liked the original version of TextFlow, but it ended up not being very useful precisely because no one I wanted to work with was particularly interested in having AIR installed on their machines. Not that they were actively against it, either, just that they didn’t feel it was worth the bother for just this app (obviously I’m not talking about TweetDeck or Twhirl users here!). Now they can edit documents directly in their browser via a private link, so they don’t need to mess about with AIR to help out with the collaboration.

It’s a very nice update, but it leaves me wishing that I didn’t have to kick things off using the AIR application to begin with. Regardless, that’s just what I did to test the web-based version. If you’d like to try it out, TextFlow offers a Test Drive which has the same functionality.

All you have to do to share your document from within the AIR app is add members to your group in the “Share” sidebar, and then click “Share” whenever you make changes that you’d like distributed to all parties.

Anyone on your list receives a unique URL that will load up a TextFlow editor instance right in their web browser. It has all the same features as the document editor of the AIR app, but your collaborators won’t need to download anything and can get to work or see your revisions right away.

Even if you took a pass on TextFlow the first time around, it might be worth another look now that it’s largely platform independent. And it’s still free for the Personal edition, though a Professional license will cost you $99.

Have you tried TextFlow? What did you think?

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Second, the same issue came up at a recent installment of #editorchat, a weekly group meeting held on Twitter for professional writers and editors hosted by @milehighfool and @LydiaBreakfast. The question was whether writers ever did work just for the byline, exposure, and/or clips for their portfolio, and what people thought of that kind of activity. In general, the group was very averse to it, because it encourages publications to seek free submissions instead of paying writers.

There are exceptions to every rule, however, and we did agree that when you’re starting out, it’s fine to do free work for the purpose of building up your portfolio. But in today’s climate, as companies look to cut costs, will more businesses turn to unpaid resources?

If you work online, even if it’s not in a writing or editing capacity, you are bound to do some work that you don’t receive any compensation for. Sometimes that’s not your choice (I’m looking at you, clients who conveniently ignore invoices from small fish freelancers), but sometimes it is. When you do choose to do something for free, does it weaken the revenue-generating powers of the industry as a whole?

I try to limit the work I do for free to clearly defined categories. That is, I will work for free in segments where I don’t think enough capital exists to support an ecosystem of paid professionals. For example, the Canadian small press literary scene. There is no way that this space would even exist if all of its players sought compensation for their efforts. Additionally, I hope that my work in this area  supports the arts, and that is reason enough for me to pursue it.

Are my justifications for doing this work free of charge unassailable? Definitely not. One could argue that the only reason money doesn’t flow in that particular market is because there’s a glut of writers and editors like me, doing work for free that would otherwise become publicly or privately funded.

What I can’t abide is private, advertising-funded sites soliciting repeat, free submissions and offering their writers nothing but a byline and, maybe, the faint hope of a paid position writing for their print publication. That kind of behavior fosters the impression that blog writing is something not worthy of pay, making it awfully hard to be recognized as a professional in the field.

Can working for free also help you? Of course it can. Writers just starting out need some way of building their portfolios, after all. But the more the big players see this sort of thing is possible, the more reluctant they’ll be to part with their money.

I’ve talked mostly about writing above, but you could easily substitute in examples from the world of web and graphic design (check out the movement against spec work in design at no-spec.com), business consultation services, and many other web working areas.

Am I just jealously guarding my own sources of income, or does the prospect of someone doing the work you should get paid good money for, absolutely free of charge, leave you feeling out of sorts as well? Is there room for both, and where do we draw the line?

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To use TextFlow, you’ll need a word processing program that can open and save in .doc (Word) format, and Adobe AIR installed on your machine.

Before you can use TextFlow, however, you need drafts to work from. Start with a single Word document. Send a copy to anyone whose input you think is needed. Everyone can work on their copy of the document invidually, simultaneously. Normally this kind of thing would give me a massive headache, since I’d be worried about sifting through three or four different variants of the same paragraph and playing spot the difference.

TextFlow with one variant document.

Once you have multiple versions of the same document, you simply launch TextFlow, and then drag your original to the application window. Now, you’re free to drag and drop revisions from multiple parties on top of your original, and TextFlow will compare the versions automatically. Once it’s done the comparison process, it displays changes inline in colored boxes. Clicking on the boxes in different places (icons appear when you hover with the cursor) will allow you to Accept, Hide, Reject, or move the suggestion to the app’s built-in scratchboard.

TextFlow using two variant documents.

You can save your session at any time, which does not save over the original document, but instead generates a .tfx file that allows you to jump back in to your editing at the same point you left off. To produce a .doc file, you can click the Export button at the top of the application pane.

TextFlow is still in beta, so the lagginess I occasionally experienced wasn’t surprising, but it does slow down the editing procedure a bit. The sections it recognized as changed in my test document were also sometimes unnecessarily long, i.e. if I changed one sentence in a paragraph, the whole paragraph was flagged. This last point could be a feature of the app, though, since changing a sentence might also change the context in which it appears, necessitating changes in the surrounding text as well.

Overall, it’s definitely an app to watch if you do collaborative writing with multiple authors, or if you have a lot of client stakeholders that want direct input into the final product. You can download the TextFlow beta here, or check out on online interactive demo here.

Note that in order to use the app, you’ll need to sign up, but the registration process is very simple.

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live blogging an event

I recently live-blogged a 3-day conference. Gearing up for the event, I posted here about the equipment I was bringing as well as musings about the dynamics of live blogging. While I’ve live blogged parts of events and have Power-Twittered a conference before, this was my first full-scale, solo, multimedia live-blogging project for a client.

The live blogging was a success. In fact, the client was caught up in the excitement of seeing posts showing up literally in the middle of sessions with quotes and commentary about the topics discussed that they finally “got” what a blog could be.

Everyone at the conference was fired up to see images from the sessions and events and video clips of themselves or their fellow conference attendees waxing philosophical about the conference proceedings.

Here are my key lessons from the three days. For anyone whose work will take them into the realm of live blogging, I hope these prove helpful.

1. Two bloggers are better than one.

I would never recommend live-blogging solo unless the event you are covering does not have concurrent tracks. Deciding which events I should cover was the responsibility of the client, however, it soon became apparent that it would be useful to get coverage of more than just one of the concurrent events. Luckily, one of the client’s staff members stepped up to the plate and asked to blog so we were able to cover two of the three tracks. I did try to jump out of a session once in a while to hit a third one but found my coverage became a bit disjointed.

2. Multimedia can trump words.

Once I realized the other blogger was good at summarizing the content of sessions, I began focusing more on capturing images, video and audio. While I did try to grab quotes and key points from sessions, I found that once I captured something on video in particular, that just seemed more effective – and more accurate – than writing something. At first, I worried that I might be slacking, however, the results of using multimedia was the clincher to the blog’s overall success. People just didn’t realize what was possible until they started seeing video on the blog.

3. Problem-solving is truly on-the-fly.

In order to get video clips on the blog, I had to think on my feet. The WordPress set up didn’t accommodate anything over 8 MB, and the video clips all exceeded that. I hadn’t discussed any optional image or video hosting solutions with the client before the event because I was under the impression that their set up would be sufficient. Suddenly, I was stuck in the middle of the conference without the ability to upload my growing archive of video. So I made an executive decision and began uploading the video to my Flickr account as a stop-gap measure and embedding it on the blog.

I also wanted to present a set of images as a slideshow. Slide.com immediately came to mind. While not the most elegant slideshow solution, it worked in a pinch. We’ll be replacing that slideshow with a more professional one created for Flickr and adding additional slideshows to the blog.

4. Editorial processes go out the window.

I think we made some people nervous when they realized there would be no editorial approval process for our posts, and it wasn’t until the first series of posts went up that everyone realized that we were documenting the sessions, not editorializing them. I think we also ruffled some feathers because we hadn’t gone through “proper channels” before running with off-site solutions such as Flickr and Slide.com. Without on-the-fly decisions, however, the momentum of the blog would have been brought to a screeching halt. When live blogging, you need to be able to reach for all the tools available, even if just as temporary solutions, to keep things moving forward.

5. Gadgets can get in the way.

I spent the entire conference often with a recording device in each hand and another one or two on the table in front of me to to mention my always-open laptop. Sometimes, I had to just put everything down and just listen. Or I found myself reaching for my notebook and a pen to hand write some notes – the old-fashioned way. With a gadget in hand, my brain was looking for ways to use it. In order to truly hear and absorb what was being said in a session, I had to step away from the technology.

Live Blogging for Dollars

Live blogging is a great way to document an event, build excitement around an event, and provide a multimedia experience for people who cannot attend the event. And it is also an excellent skill to add to your Web working repertoire, one that takes well-rounded knowledge of not only blogging but multimedia production and the fine art of capturing moments and quotes without creating an intrusion.

For this job, I charged a day rate for my work. For live blogging, you could also charge hourly, however, make sure your hourly rate is high enough to cover the multi-faceted work. Or you could do it per project.

Have you turned live-blogging into a new revenue opportunity? What have been some lessons you’ve learned as you live blog events?

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