EtherPad – How To Write Collaboratively Online?
Have you ever needed to quickly edit a document with a co-worker, partner or friend? Usually co-authoring the document ment e-mailing it back and forth more than the number of ants on this planet. If they were sitting next to you, you might have probably just stuck it on a USB stick and gave it to them.
Though all in all, you would loose valuable time while you waited for them to finish and get it back to you. Only to start the process all over again. For anyone who have experienced this, you know it can (and does) hinder progress, efficiency and productivity. Collaboratively working on documents has come to the forfront of modern day systems, and is more of a natural way of doing things.
EtherPad (etherpad.com) accomplishes just that. It is a simple looking application with a big soul. It sets out to will the gap in the world of Web 2.0 applications and internet culture. Most of us only know of collaboration on the internet in video games. When most of us hear collaborative, we think one person works on it and then other. Each taking turns to get the job done.
True collaborative applications, such as EtherPad, allow you to work syncronously on the same file(s) at the same time! Why is this good news for you? Let’s put it simply:
- Collaboration – working together for a common goal
- Collaborative applications have been proven to increase productivity and decrease lag time.
- You can ’share’ documents in real time with anyone who is involved. No more sending out 17 copies of each version of each document.
- Less lag time, means you can get more work done which overall is good for you.
There are many more benefits to such applications, you can look those up yourself though. If you still aren’t convinced collaborative apps aren’t good enough, look at the new Google Wave – email technology system. Their whole new e-mail is based on collaboration.
So, why does EtherPad do and why is it great? It’s FREE! We love free! And simple. Very simple … oh yeah, did we mention, no registration required to use the free version? Sweet! Check it out:
The interface is also very simple and easy to learn. No real learning curve which makes it all the better. With it you are able to type your document in using simple styling effects (Bold, italics, unerline, strikethrough), bullets points and a few other toys.
For the collaboration part, you can invite people in to edit your document with you. You have to click “Invite” to directly invite someone or click “Share this pad” (both buttons do the same thing).
Also as any good collaborative tool, it has a revisioning system. Albiet a simple one, but it has one which is important. So you can retreive the older versions of your “pad” without trouble.
The version you see above is the free version, the one I use. There are two paid versions of Etherpad as well. One where you can place a pad on your own website (for $8 USD per user per month) or install a whole Etherpad on your own server (for $99 USD per user).
Unless your a corporation, I say stay with the free version for now. It’s simple, it’s effective and it’s what we use here.
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After a short struggle with Songbird, Jan Leger of Songbird was kind enough to point me in the right direction to get it working. For those of you keeping track, I’ve ranted about reviewed Songbird before: here and here. It’s now time to give Songbird .5 a nice run for it’s money. Let’s see if this new version can stand up to my high level of expectation. (Click here to read an explanation of how I review stuff)
Again, here I’m using the standard interface without any changes for this review. Why? As explained in a previous review, you don’t go around saying how great a Honda Civic is just by looking at highly modded Civics. Onto the review, hit the more button for my thoughts and impressions of this darkly colored bird.
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For the longest time Olympus’s stuff has kinda sucked in Linux. Ok, lets me frank: it plain and simple didn’t work. And even if you did get it to work, they had their own pathetic and horrible file format. Really annoying. But at least, a solution!
A guy (or girl) going by the username tristan.will on code.google has created a working solution. The project is dubbed ODVR. You can access the project page here (http://code.google.com/p/odvr/).
The only problem is a lack of documentation in the .deb package and the help command (-h) doesn’t give the best info either. Anywho, click the more button to read upon the goodies this great software offers (FOR FREE!)
*quick note #1: I use Kubuntu Linux 8.4 AMD 64. Just in case if you were wondering*
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