Crowdsourcing is a nice buzzword, but there is a little something behind it. I’ve been using an application called SubEthaEdit for a long time. In fact, when Zack and I sat down to build the outline for the Enterprise book from Apress, we wrote the outline using SubEthaEdit. It later ended up in OmniOutliner and ultimately as the starting point for the documents that comprise each chapter of the book, but the original text was made by the two of us on our laptops at the same time. SubEthaEdit is a text editor. But it allows multiple people to edit a text document concurrently. It has support for code or just plain old text and you can allow other people to edit documents while you are working on them. Each persons changes show up color coded to their name in the list of people currently working on the document.
This makes for a great tool for taking notes in class (although I rarely see it used in educational environments) because each student can add their own notes, hopefully resulting in a more comprehensive set of notes.
SubEthaEdit also can be used for writing code and has line numbers to aid in that. If you are writing code, it can complete various aspects of code and sound alarms if you have syntactically incorrect code (as I often do at 4am). It also has powerful Applescript capabilities that allow for very granular management of text. It doesn’t have a number of the more flashy features of, let’s say, a Microsoft Word, but I have Word for that. When I need to wrangle me some text, I almost invariably go to SubEthaEdit. And if I’m looking for a little crowdsourcing love, I definitely use it. There aren’t many products that I give a ringing endorsement to, but SubEthaEdit is one of the few on my list.
