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Coauthoring posts with jybe

This is an experiment in simultaneous (sort of) editing using the Jybe plugin for Firefox.
So here I am typing (says Eleanor).
this is cool (says Brian).
test - test - test - test - test - test (all from Brian)

But in sharing the account we got out of synch - while Brian creatively added his mic-testing, Eleanor’s version looked like this (even though it got clobbered by Brian’s version in the database):

eleanor: So here I am typing…. (refresh)
brian: this is cool… (refresh)
eleanor: where did my text go?…. (refresh)

So this is a test post to see which person of a shared account really owns the database (wrote Eleanor, when she published this, to the confusion of feed-readers)

Brian remarks: Actually, we are sharing the account, you have to hit refresh after me because we are not pushing that command - but we can.

Then Eleanor says:

Hey Brian, did you know I am actually Feedster’s Feed of the Day? Nice day to screw around with this…

Bringing this back to something that’s useful for readers, Brian helpfully adds:

This exchange above was between Eleanor and myself as we attempted to collaboratively write a posting in real time, right from the native Wordpress blogging interface. Needless to say, we encountered a few technical problems but overall, we were able to have an interesting proof of concept in collaborative blogging. In doing further testing, we figured out the pattern to make this work: NOTE: we must both login to the same blogging account and then use Jybe to share the HTML view of the blogging page.

• Step 1: Person A, type in information and then save to the DB
• Step 2: Person B, hit the refresh button on the browser - this will get the latest post from the DB
• Step 3: Person B, type and then save
• Step 4: Person A: refresh

This approach needs lots of refinement needs to be tested in other blogging environments. But, collaborative blogging could prove to have great potential. Imagine having multiple people all working on a blog post together in real time? It would require some coordination of participants, but doesn’t all collaboration? Give your comments on if you see this as a valuable addition to your blogging environment.

Pretty interesting…..