First things first: An interview with Jim Coudal is up at Under the Iron, the first in quite a while. Jim generously offers a discount to the terrific Jewelboxing CD packaging system - details are at the end of the interview. (However, the discount times out at November 15, so you had better hurry.)
Second… Writeboard rocks. Really. It does.
Here’s the editorial process of most other UTI interviews performed in the past:
- Perform interview over IM, email or string telephone.
- Edit:
- Any of interviewee or interviewer edits.
- Pass to other part as email attachment, IM file transfer or hosted text file, linked by IM or email.
- Other part figures out what’s been changed or First part tells them what’s been changed.
- Repeat.
- Decide it’s good and publish.
Writeboard dramatically simplifies step two (editing).
- The material stays put - the only thing any one of us has to remember is the Writeboard password (and I guess the Writeboard URL, which is bookmarkable).
- Writeboard’s biggest strength is its terrific diffing ability. Any one of us can quickly see what’s been changed since the last version (or compare any two versions, for that matter).
- Writeboard offers an RSS feed so that no one of us are out of the loop. (If the interviewee does not use RSS, I can send him/her a copy via email after my edits - manually, though.)
- There’s a simple comments facility for notes transcending different versions.
I’ve had a lot of fun doing this interview, and even the mostly tedious editing stage was both more fun than usual and way more efficient. For my next interview, I’m thinking of using Writeboard during the entire process, which might actually cut down the editing stage significantly.
Well done, 37signals.