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Not a native English speaker? Here’s an invite for Spellr.us!

Ernst-Jan Written on 3rd June 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS some text
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

As my co-editor Boris has mentioned before, most of the Next Web’s contributing editors aren’t native English speakers. That’s why we’re quite fond of Spellr.us, an Australian start-up that develops a remote spell checking service. Boris blogged about them two weeks ago. After mentioning we all hate typos and ask you to notify us as soon as you see one, he wrote: “the solution Spellr.us promises to offer sounds even better. They remotely monitor your blog or website and send you updates when they find errors and typos.” I figured it was about time to mail founder Kevin Garber to see how Spellr.us is coming along.

http://blog.spellr.us/Garber: “We have been working hard at refining the spell check engine to have it free from as many “false positives”. We are almost at a stage where we are happy with the results.” After that, Garber and his team will set up an introductory pricing plan and start working on the automatic monitoring: “The developers would shoot me if I locked anything in, but we are hoping to have introductory pricing offers in a month, and monitoring a month thereafter.”

Spellr.us is a really relevant service for all the main-land European bloggers out there who blog in English. But we have to wait for another two months. Luckily Garber has decided to give you 80 private beta invites, that makes the waiting less hard. Get yours here.

If we all use the service, Garber and his team could check what the most common mistakes per country are. So every Frenchman, German, or Italian would be able to check where the danger in spelling lies for him.

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

4 comments/trackbacks to “Not a native English speaker? Here’s an invite for Spellr.us!”

  1. Jun 3, 2008: » Blog Archive » Custom Dictionaries and Options

    [...] have had another article written on us – you can see it here. And please continue to send us feedback – we read each and every one and try to respond to all. [...]

  1. By Maarten on Jun 3, 2008

    When I read the title I thought: “What’s new about a spell check?”. But this sounds really cool!

    Thanks for the invite!

    Reply

  2. By Kevin Garber on Jun 3, 2008

    Hi Ernst-Jan

    Thanks for the article.

    I hope your readers that register for the beta will find the tool useful. We will get all invites processed over the next day or so.

    One thing that your readers in particular may also be interested in is that spellr.us already has German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish capability.

    We haven’t fine tuned for these languages yet – we will get to them one by one once we are finished with the English side of things.

    Us Anglos are very envious of you multi-lingual folk!

    We look forward to receiving feedback from you and your beta testers.

    Regards from Sydney Australia.
    Kevin

    Reply

  3. By Martin Mulder on Jun 5, 2008

    Nice idea — the spell checker build into Firefox is a great first step, but I often find myself running articles through MS-Word to catch to more obvious grammar mistakes.

    Just got a free invite for the beta — seems that there are still plenty left.

    Reply

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