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Explaining co-authoring shenanigans

This post is an attempt to offer some perspective on perhaps the world’s first almost-realtime collaborative blog post. Gosh, feed readers, you can’t say I don’t deliver; but I won’t insist on invention rights.

As I blogged about Jybe the other day, Jybe brings some interesting possibilities. Brian and I were chatting via his tool (you can chat while you browse together, which has the advantage, for you folks still trying to appear fully diligent at work, of not looking like a normal chatwindow) on what sorts of stuff you can do.

Today I’m interested in its potential to allow collaborative editing, a sort of cheap and dirty SubEthaEdit or MoonEdit. I thought I’d log us into my blog running on WordPress, which from his end meant that he had to log in too. So I created a new user for this kind of play, jybe, and off we went.

Our first post is already (unfortunately - haha) public. We had some confusion over who owned the db entry which just had to be solved - wham - by a publish-to-the-wild.

Brian (who doesn’t have a blog, so perhaps consider his mic-check a real throatclearing) is now in the Jybe account adding some more content and context to our first shared post. Which, in the spirit of things, I will probably go back and do something to as well.

Jybe allows super-cheap conferencing and shared browsing, which is great for brainstorming and threshing through ideas. I’d like to hook it into shared capture of some sort.

Brian is going to think more on the db end, and I’m going to get him set up with his own Wordpress install so he can understand the workings, but I’m really not sure what will be the result of this. In some ways Jybe is a more inherently wiki-friendly application — any time you can have multiple people editing, you should have versioning. Hmmmmm…….