
Has anyone tried providing a service to improve people's blog posts (e.g., in terms of grammar, style, tone, fact checking, etc.)? - amichail

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zaidf
I am not sure if there are enough people that care/realize the importance of
this. I personally do.

Fortunately for me I had great English teachers in high school that designed
their classes around effective communication rather than fancy writing. I
still drop them an email every now and then to get their advice on how I could
communicate a given idea more effectively.

Other than that I love Orwell's paper on
English(<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm)> He makes great
points that every blogger can learn from.

-Zaid 

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tinkertim
A service that crawls a given URL and reports spelling or grammar mistakes
would be relatively easy. The 'lynx' and 'spell' utilities inherent in most
Linux distributions would suffice for the basics.

I think the service would be better marketed as a last line of defense against
linguistic embarrasment. If the 'service' found a typo, punctuation (that
would be a little harder) or grammar error on a given URL it could simply
e-mail a designated contact, show the error in context and suggestions to
correct it.

This would be useful only in situations where ajax based "as you type"
correction (or more traditional regex post-posting) is not possible, or if a
site blindly imported harvested content from other sources without human
checking for such errors.

Given the ease of which this could be developed, I say .. go for it.

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dfranke
Two reservations come to mind:

1\. How many people would want this? It seems like the number of people who
take their blogs seriously enough to be willing to pay for this is maybe a
thousand.

2\. I don't see how this can scale. Unless you're thinking of AI, or some sort
of peer-to-peer network, then you're selling a skilled-labor-intensive
service, not a product. You might be able to form a profitable small business,
but I wouldn't call it a startup.

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whacked_new
It doesn't need to be as purpose-specific as the title suggests. Blogs are a
medium of communication; there are many possible media.

Consider this interaction. A: this rose is green. B: roses are not green. C:
(so the rose is not green!). C: actually, it's not a rose, it's a leaf.

This can occur in a blog, in a chatroom, and more importantly, it occurs in
everyday life. Proofreading, fact-checking and such is a streamlined
application of this self-correction process (e.g., of the ABC system above),
applied to written material.

While we are a far way off from AI that can do this on the fly, the processes
certainly is extendible, and should be extended. It's how ideas evolve.

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markovich
This the type of thing that is doomed to fail. And it _should_ fail, because
filtering peoples thoughts through a machine will lead to everyone speaking
the same online, when in real life people do not speak that way!

Blogs are real people with no editors. If you want correct grammar, and fact
checked posts, read a newspaper.

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yaacovtp
Paid copy editors already battle with writers over grammer and word choice and
you want to provide a service to casual writers?

Setup a package consisting of "The Elements of Style" and a link to
copyblogger.com and one of two will prove beneficial for most bloggers.

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whacked_new
The service isn't actually trivial. And I don't know if amichail has anything
specific in mind, but improving the quality of a writing is not as simple as
following stylistic guidelines.

First, battling over grammar and word choice shows that there are usually
multiple interpretations and construction methods for a single utterance.

Second, grammar and word preferences change over time. While this makes a case
for writing fashionably, it also means that really good writings are valued
for content; good content can be expressed without strict adherence to
guidelines. Rap, for example. It makes no sense to proofread rap.

In any case, there are no absolute rules for language use. This point is
stronger when you have a large readership, and even stronger, when your
readership has the ability to talk directly to the author, and perhaps even
contribute.

The challenge is to be able to accomodate a huge number of these copy editors,
who come and go as they please, shout or whisper their preferences, and
somehow make the end useful and actually better.

~~~
dfranke
"good content can be expressed without strict adherence to guidelines. Rap,
for example."

Apparently, "good content" is one of those phrases subject to multiple
interpretations.

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whacked_new
my writing led to confusion and thus was not "good content." but ah, you know,
good content. you know? :)

notice that dfranke just proofread my post.

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whacked_new
Yes, but present / future tense :)

