Participation Literacy

About text:

Share documents instantly & collaborate real-time.
Pick exactly who can access your documents.

Edit your documents from anywhere.
Nothing to download — your browser is all you need.

Store your documents securely online.
Offsite storage plus data backup every 10 seconds.

Easy to use.
Clean, uncluttered screens with a familiar, desktop feel.

Writely is an online word processor with the most important features corresponding to desktop word processors such as Ms Word and Open Office Word, including tables, images, and a spellchecker. Documents can be imported from and saved (exported) to the most common document formats: Ms Word, Open Office, RTF, HTML etc. It is also possible to save to PDF. The native format is HTML. All files are hosted at the Writely server, which also includes images belonging to the documents.

The screenshot displays the most central part of the Writely toolbar. Normally when you work with a HTML file, the included images are separated from the actual document. If you move the file to another place on the hard disk you have to change the path to the image or the file will lose track of the image and is unable to display it. In Writely you do not have to know where the document file or the image files are stored and in that respect it is like working in Ms Word, where the image files are embedded in the document file. The reason for this is the storing, which is not hierarchical, but based on tags. The non hierarchical tag based storing model is very much in line with the Web 2.0 concept.

As standard a document can only be viewed by yourself, but you can also mark the document as published. If the document is published it can be viewed by everyone, or just the friends and colleagues you specify. You can also share the documents in a deeper sense by inviting your friends to co edit the document.

One of the most cherished features, by me, is the ability to publish the document directly to my blog. This feature is quite excellent since blog editors are too simple for some articles. For example, blog editors have primitive spellcheckers or non at all. The spellchecker in Writely is similar to the one in Ms Word.

The most important feature in this discussion is the ability to collaborate. Many authors can work on the same document. In some sense this is old news. There have been tools for collaboration around for many years. The newness lies in this feature in this particular context. This is one of the features in Web 2.0 which is going to make big changes in the document concept in the years to come. The document as a concept will probably change from a personal entity to a social.