A huge news event just broke and you’re having one of those moments that all writers alike wish for: clarity of thought and direction in your writing. As you’re typing away your thoughts, excited to hit the seductive “publish post” button after you’ve proofed your piece a bit, a familiar nagging at your gut tells you that you may have some typos due to how fast you did all this.
Now, there’s a solution to that feeling: Edit Huddle.
Edit Huddle is a tool that helps writers and bloggers stop worrying about having several rounds of proofing before publishing a post. In a fast-moving Internet age, when people are racing to chime in on current events on blogs, worrying a little bit less about simple typos is a precious tool.
Founder of Edit Huddle, Imran Ahmad, a ’14 MBA candidate at UChicago Booth School of Business, describes Edit Huddle as “a tool to help bloggers stop worrying about petty edits or people flooding their comment stream focusing on grammar, spelling, or other issues that hurt discussion.” Ahmad says the goal of the tool is ”to allow bloggers to privately get specific editorial feedback on their blogs.”
So how does Edit Huddle work?
As described by the Edit Huddle team, “Readers simply highlight the text they want to edit and identify what type of error it is. That information goes directly to the blogger in a series of charts that allow them to sync directly with WordPress and other sites to seamlessly fix any potential errors.” One useful detail to note is the proposed integration of the Edit Huddle tool as a button on popular blogging sites.
Ahmad and his team, including Adam Bain, Pradeep Maddineni, Kunal Shah, took part in a Hackathon as part of the 2011 Chicago Social Development Camp. Ahmed formed a team and over the course of 36 hours and developed Edit Huddle. Ahmad’s team was selected as the winner for best design and won second place out of a field of around 30 entries.
When asked how he came up with the idea, Ahmad recounts the simple way it happened while he was reading a TechCrunch article online. Ahmad saw an error and wasn’t able to easily report it to the writer. Ahmad asked himself why there wasn’t a simpler way for the blogger to be notified about the error?
Ahmad explains, ”I kept seeing blogs with basic errors. The wrong use of “your”, factual misstatements and even simple spelling errors. With thousands of readers reading your blog, lots of people identify the same issues.”
Following the “Fix It” mentality that Edit Huddle brings to the blogging world, Ahmad says, ”I decided that it was high time we used the power of the crowd to provide private feedback directly to the bloggers so that they can make the changes and not be worried about people flooding the comments section with grammatical issues.”
The Edit Huddle team is currently at Startup Weekend Chicago making progress on their company. So far, the team has contacted over 1,000 bloggers and has collected numerous survey responses gauging the need for a tool like Edit Huddle.
Rachel Hyman, part of Edit Huddle marketing, reports that Seth Kravitz, co-founder of Technori and avid blogger, stated that “This is something we would definitely use on our website…I love the simplicity of your implementation.”
Hyman also reports that Alec Wilhelm from The Next Web has also demonstrated significant interest in Edit Huddle’s progress.
The team plans to launch the tool live on 8 blogs by Sunday, just in time for their presentation at Startup Weekend Chicago, competing with 9 other teams at the Excelerate Labs headquarters.
If you are a blogger or just someone interested in this tool, here are a few things you can do to get in the Edit Huddle loop: Check out Edit Huddle’s page and contact Rachel Hyman if you are interested in beta testing. Also, complete this one-minute survey and connect with Edit Huddle on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
As a blogger that gets bogged down by perfecting grammar and spelling at the cost of interrupting my thought-flow, this is a tool I’m looking forward to having at my disposal. And since I wrote this article so fast and I’m sure there are typos galore, I wish Edit Huddle’s “Fix It” button for your grammatical-error-induced annoyance to let me know.
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