GooseGrade Brings Citizen Editing to WordPress Blogs
gooseGrade has a unique and valuable perspective when it comes to blogging: Unlike traditional media, blogs are lacking the invisible army of copy editors carefully making sure everything that is written is also written accurately and well. Today they are releasing a WordPress plugin that invites your audience to help proofread your blog. GooseGrade got some press from RWW and others last October.
Honestly, we think this is a really great idea. We have seen countless blog posts from sites great and small (even our site on occasion) that contain spelling, punctuation, and factual errors. To many readers each blemish of this type removes a 'reputation point' from that blog's score. The more responsible sites will quickly catch these errors and correct them, but without the expert eye of a trained copy editor, sometimes they can still go overlooked.
Here's where the gooseGrade WordPress plugin comes in. Extending gooseGrade's philosophy of harnessing the power of the Internet to help catch and correct these issues, this plugin closes the loop on WordPress stand-alone blogs, allowing submitted corrections to be seen from within the WordPress dashboard. The corrections list is very Wikipedia-like, showing the original block of text on the left, and the corrected block on the right. One more click and the edit is committed to the post and you are done. Brilliant!
If you have a hosted WordPress blog, and you weren't a newspaper writer or editor in a previous life, we recommend you check out the gooseGrade plugin. And keep in mind that gooseGrade has a code snippet you can drop in to your site's HTML if you use something other than WP, like Blogger or TypePad.
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Eh sounds interesting, but I think people will find a way to exploit it like crazy. I would not use this plugin. Better to just pay an editor i think.
Oh, thank God! I've been wanting the ability for people to alert me of typos or inaccuracies for some time now. But I didn't want an email, I just wanted a button to hit "approve change". Thanks for sharing this!
I just tried adding gooseGrade to my blog. Apparently, my CSS stylesheet clobbered theirs, because the pop-up login form was so misshapen as to be unusable. They also don't code to web standards, using inline event handlers and href="javascript:void(0);" style links. Even on the gooseGrade site, some of their links don't work for me. These issues are all easily avoided with a little attention to detail and best practices.
It's a decent idea, but the implementation is severely lacking.
Phil - Is RWW going to give gooseGrade a try? :)
Andrew - I was a gooseGrade early adopter. Although I encountered a few minor bugs in its early stages, I haven't encountered any issues with it in a long time. Also, the new Wordpress plugin seems to be working fine for me so far. I just checked gooseGrade.com to see if I would find the the broken links you mentioned, and couldn't find them. What are you clicking on? Maybe there's just a glitch in your side of the Matrix? :)
Good luck with it - I hope you'll give it another shot, since it's rather nifty (and WAY cheaper than copy editors)!
@Andrew
gooseGrade is founded on the idea that nobody is perfect. Can you email the errors you found to jbpounders@gooseGrade.com
Thanks for your help!
Wait... My grammar is not infallible, so I may be wrong, but I think RWW might need gooseGrade in this post!
Should the sentence, "To many readers each blemish of this type removes a 'reputation point' from that blog's score," have a comma after readers? Is "to many readers" an introductory clause that requires a comma to follow it?
If you don't have the gooseGrade badge and button on your site, am I committing a faux pas by mentioning a potential error? If so, I apologize! :) One of gooseGrade's benefits is the way it signals an open invitation to offer constructive criticism of the more nit-picky sort.
At the very least, gooseGrade may serve as a form of relief for grammar-obsessed folks such as I. ;)
Oops, I have a correction on my blog! Off I go, to accept or reject it.
MJ - The short answer is no, because RWW has a couple of human editors.
However, I did install it on my personal blog, Scribkin (http://www.scribkin.com)
From watching the video, to be honest it's a ridiculously unintuitive UX.
Grade this? Sounds like a rating system, not corrections. Having to highlight text in order to choose spelling corrections or another option? No one will know that without prior instruction.
All in all, I'm left feeling like it's a good concept with poor execution.
What makes the service particularly attractive to publishers is that it tracks these errors and corrections in a central location. If you're part of a group blog, this system helps you figure out who on your team needs the most development or hand-holding before hitting the publish button.
Excellent idea!! Anything that helps improve one's writing is a very good thing to use.
very good Idea, and nice rip of the CNN page. I tough a second I was on cnn.com, anyway, I'll use it.
thank you
Seems like a cool concept - I'll give it a go.
For the record, I've Skyped and emailed with the folks at gooseGrade and they're working to correct the issues I saw. I sent them a screenshot of the login form mangled from its interaction with my blog's CSS. I'm hopeful they'll resolve the issues and I'll be able to add it to my blog. It never hurts to have more eyes helping find grammar/spelling mistakes.
If you're part of a group blog
waa website ku shaqaynaya si ah cadaalad
Grade this? Sounds like a rating system, not corrections. Having to highlight text in order to dış cephe choose spelling corrections or another option? No one will know that cephe without prior instruction.
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Thanks
I didn't want an email, I just wanted a button to hit "approve change". Thanks for sharing this!
thanks for the info!
very nice wordpress block, i gust love the design.
Good Post! This is an interesting concept. I like your blog. So, keep up the GREAT job.