How do you collaborate on a book when one author (DHH) is in San Francisco, one’s in Chicago (Jason), and one’s in NYC (me)? Last week, we did a joint writing session and pulled it off. Here’s how we did it:
We all log into iChat and start an audio chat. That way we can discuss what we’re doing.
Then we work on one essay from the book at a time and paste the current version into SubEthaEdit. While originally designed for coding together, its collaboration features work great for co-writing text too.
All you need to do is drag a person’s name from iChat into SubEthaEdit and then they’re collaborating on the document with you. Color coding lets you see who’s editing what. It works so well that you can have multiple people editing at the same time and it doesn’t get (too) confusing.
We even use this setup to collaborate on text when we’re all in the same room together. It’s a great way to let everyone take a crack at text without it leading to chaos.
The only downside is that tone can get a little inconsistent when different people are editing. After the session is wrapped, I go through the text again and make sure everything flows well and the tone is consistent.
A screenshot from the SubEthaEdit site.
Tim
on 26 May 09Interesting article.
I would have thought that you’d use Writeboard (http://www.writeboard.com/).
Nathan Barry
on 26 May 09That is quite helpful. I will have to look into it.
@Tim Writeboard doesn’t work very well for live collaboration since it requires you to click save. But for other purposes Writeboard is great software.
David Andersen
on 26 May 09What amazes me isn’t the technology, but the three-way co-writing/editing. Group writing/editing of the same passages has never worked well for me. How do you avoid endless debates about tone, syntax, voice, etc.?
Keith
on 26 May 09Do i feel a new co-writing app in the works soon?
Tim
on 26 May 09I’m trying to understand the true use case for needing live document collaboration.
It seems to me that live document collaboration inherently implies that the person requesting the live collaboration either: doesn’t trust the other person will do the work properly and or won’t give that person ownership of that work.
Why must this co-authoring must be “live” as opposed to giving a person ownership of a section, they write the section, and send it to you for review?
Seems the later case would be much more efficient and effective.
ML
on 26 May 09How do you avoid endless debates about tone, syntax, voice, etc.?
A few reasons: We’ve been collaborating for years so we’re mosty on the same page, we’re in sync as far as the ideas go, and, for the most part, we’ve already collaborated on these essays previously.
Why must this co-authoring must be “live” as opposed to giving a person ownership of a section, they write the section, and send it to you for review?
It’s all part of a back and forth process of iterating and improving each essay over time. What you suggest happens at first. Later, when the time comes to revise, revisit, or respond to comments from our editor, it can help to do it jointly.
Killian
on 26 May 09Can’t wait for the new book! Are you still shooting for release early next year or should I put this on my Christmas list? :-)
FredS
on 26 May 09Sounds like a clusterfuck – no offense.
Tom Morris
on 26 May 09A less elegant, but free, open source and cross-platform, alternative to SubEthaEdit is Gobby. It runs on Windows, Linux and, with a bit of coercion, OS X.
And if you want a cross-platform in-browser equivalent, EtherPad is really awesome – http://etherpad.com/ I’ve used EtherPad for collaborative meeting notes, so that the work of scribe on a meeting could be split between multiple people.
There’s also DocSynch, which consists of a jEdit plugin and uses IRC as the underlying protocol. They claim to have plugins for Vim, Visual Studio and Eclipse on the way.
There’s a full list of collaborative editors here.
I really wish that there was a bigger community of people to use them. Back in 2004, if you went to any hackerish or community event, people would collaboratively take notes and all sorts with Hydra (what became SubEthaEdit). But when SubEthaEdit became commercial, it just disappeared again.
Scott W
on 26 May 09Long time fan of SubEthaEdit + iChat for coding. Group coding has the same problems as group writing, with regard to style, intent, etc. but in the end you get a much richer document with fewer errors. I’ve found that once our group gets into the flow of it, we do some amazing things.
@Tom, I used to use only free software, but I’ve found that most of the best stuff out there isn’t free (I work on a lot of free software projects, btw). While there are some notable exceptions (many web browsers, iTerm, Adium, QuickSilver, a few others) I think of most of the tools I use daily (Omnigraffle Pro, SubEthaEdit, Snapz Pro X, OfficeTime) are well worth what I paid for them.
Nick
on 27 May 09Over at Draftastic we’re working on a web-based editor that tries to eliminate that last little bit of confusion. We do automatic locking on arbitrary blocks of text, to eliminate collisions without (we hope) detracting from live collaboration.
SubEthaEdit is great (Drafty was written with Coda, which is built on SubEtha), but we haven’t yet convinced everyone we know to get Macs, and even with just two long-time collaborators, we kept typing over each other.
I love that collaborative editing is finally catching on, but completely unconstrained editors like SubEthaEdit, Google Docs, and EtherPad are all going to heroic lengths to make sure people can type over each other, which I don’t think anyone actually wants. Why throw all that computing power and bandwidth at letting users trip each other up? It seems like the sort of thing that’s ripe for better, simpler interfaces.
Warren Henning
on 27 May 09How are you not regurgitating The Mythical Man-Month without giving credit where credit is due in a paragraph like that?
Tom Morris
on 27 May 09Scott W: I use non-free software also (I have a SubEthaEdit license). But I have to talk to people in Windows-land and Linux-land, hence the need for alternatives to SubEthaEdit. I’d really like it if Emacs, Vim and TextMate were to all have something like the SubEtha engine or libinfinity (the underlying library for Gobby) built-in to the next version.
michael Troy
on 27 May 09This would be great for remote pair programming.
Scott W
on 27 May 09@Tom, good call. I haven’t run into the cross-platform issue yet (yes, I am blessed!). I’ll give Gobby a look when I do.
Arik Jones
on 29 May 09Like others are wondering, isn’t this the perfect fit and use case for Writeboard?
P Cogen
on 29 May 09You can now use Google Wave to do the exact same thing.
If google will come up with a gmail/wave based helpdesk , it will solve all small business worries.
We are a small business , that rely heavily on just google apps.
Daniel Clemens
on 01 Jun 09Hi All,
Many of us at AppJet, the makers of Etherpad, loved using SubEthaEdit, and wanted the really real time collaboration experience to be made available across all platforms.
We recently added new features like rich text and import/export to Word/PDF. http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/may-new-features
Would love feedback from the 37Signals community on Etherpad—where can we improve? What would you like to see?
Hope everyone is enjoying a fantastic Sunday and that you all start out the week magnificently.
Warmly,
Daniel
COO, AppJet, Inc. www.etherpad.com
Pies
on 01 Jun 09I think EtherPad is the best thing since sliced bread. Platform-agnostic, no install, free.
markus
on 02 Jun 09Is google Wave the end of expensive 37signals?
37signals is like salesforce, overpriced productivity apps.
This discussion is closed.