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Win a Flip by corecting our speling and gramar with GooseGrade

Written on 31st October 2008 32 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

If you’re a long-time reader of The Next Web, you know we started from scratch in November, less than 12 months ago. A couple of Dutch dudes in an Amsterdam office with just one goal: becoming Europe’s largest tech blog. Well, we know we’re on our way (see Feedburner), but at the same time realize there’s still a long way to go.

Our English still needs some improvement, as it’s our second language. We’ve followed classes, are lucky enough to have native speakers David Petherick and Zee Kane on board, and we’re now ready for the next step: crowd-sourcing copy-editing.

A month ago, one of those long-time readers, Bob Boynton, tipped me about GooseGrade – a service that makes it possible for blog readers to copy-edit ~~pieces~~ articles. Excellent! Like it was made for us. So as soon as I got the chance, I installed the GooseGrade button on The Next Web. You can find it on the article pages, right next to the Digg button.

Let’s organize a competition!

If you want to use GooseGrade, you’ll have to register first. That creates a little barrier. So to motivate you, we’re organizing a competition. The person who makes the most corrections before December 1st will receive a Flip Video.

Here’s how to win this nifty little device:

Sign-up to GooseGrade
Noticed an error or typo? Click on the GooseGrade button and fix it!

We will keep track of who does the most work and will reward them in December. Alright part time copy-editors, good luck!

32 Comments »

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 .

32 comments/trackbacks to “Win a Flip by corecting our speling and gramar with GooseGrade”

Nov 7, 2008: Another crowd-source initiative: rate our posts with JS-Kit
[...] not sure why, maybe we’re just inspired by the US elections. We started with launching a GooseGrade competition (correct our spelling and grammar and have the chance of winning a Flip Video), now we’ve [...]

By Piet Bakker on Oct 31, 2008

OK… just make many errors….

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By Ørv on Oct 31, 2008

I’ve noticed alot of mistakes over te past 6 months or so…. this little incentive may push me over the edge and actually do something about it.

Though my strong believe is that this type of interaction with your audience SHOULD not be necessary.

;-)

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on October 31st, 2008:
wars shouldn’t be necessary as well.., yet they happen. So let’s strive for world peace

:p

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By Ben on October 31st, 2008:
belief ;-)

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Oct 31, 2008

Somebody already managed to find four mistakes in this post.
And yes…, the mistakes in headline are made on purpose ;-)

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By Jerry Houtman on Oct 31, 2008

Ernst, do you mean THE headline? :)

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By Danielle Bourgeois on Oct 31, 2008

Guys,

As a tech writer for one of the largest oilfield services companies in the world, I am always interested in new ways of editing. I see a number of corrections to be made but I am finding GooseGrade to be a very cumbersome tool.

For example, in both Internet Explorer (7.x) and Firefox (3.x), the fields that contain the text to be corrected and the corrected text orient themselves vertically, not horizontally, which makes corrections very difficult as teh fields are only two characters wide. Also, having to enter my credentials each time I make a correction is completely aggravating. Finally, it would be nice to be able to view and edit one’s corrections. (I made a correction to this article only to change my mind as I read further, but there is no way to communicate to the author that the corrected text should be left ‘as is.’)

I am interested to hear what other editors have to say about this tool. Until GooseGrade makes their tool easier to use, however, I fear that users will be reluctant to embrace their service.

Warm regards,

Danielle Bourgeois

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By Jerry Houtman on Oct 31, 2008

I agree Danielle, the service itself is an improvement for every blog (especially when it doesn’t concern native English speaker :)) but the interface kind of sucks ass.

Who is going to correct Goosegrade on this?

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By Bob Boynton on Oct 31, 2008

I’m looking forward to giving it a try.

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By Bob Boynton on Oct 31, 2008

I do not think it will work on the message that says a new comment is “submiting” which should be “submitting.”

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on October 31st, 2008:
thanks for point that out!

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By Jerry Houtman on October 31st, 2008:
pointing…

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By Bob Boynton on October 31st, 2008:
Arrgghh. Jerry got to make the correction before I got back.

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By Jerry Houtman on October 31st, 2008:
No worries, there’s plenty!

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on October 31st, 2008:
haha Jerry is taking the bait all the time :-)

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By Jerry Houtman on October 31st, 2008:
yeah, and I don’t even get any goosegrade credits for it…

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By Ben on Oct 31, 2008

Hmm, interesting. So how about posts before this one? Do mistakes corrected in the older posts count towards the total score too?

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on October 31st, 2008:
you bet!

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By Ben on October 31st, 2008:
Good on ya.

Are you trying to torpedo my weekend ;-)

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By Menno on Oct 31, 2008

Would love to help out, but somehow the textarea in which to edit the text is really really small…

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By Mircea on Oct 31, 2008

Do we have or does GooseGrade has a ranking system of which author is making the most mistakes :)? (who knows, I could qualify :) ).

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By John Brooks Pounders on Oct 31, 2008

@Danielle We’ve only been live for a few weeks and busy fixing things. We’re working as fast as we can to make improvements where they need to be. We’re looking to launch a new version of the tool that remembers your cookie across sites! So you should only have to log in once ;)

Thanks for the awesome feedback..

-JB

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By John Brooks Pounders on Oct 31, 2008

@Danielle, I just saw the screen shot on your blog….that’s definitely not how it should look. We’re working to fix it now.

-JB

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By Jerry Houtman on October 31st, 2008:
FYI that’s how I see it as well…

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By John Brooks Pounders on Oct 31, 2008

Alright the text box issue has been fixed. Enjoy grading and please send us any other feedback.

John Brooks Pounders
gooseGrade.com
CEO

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By notafish on Nov 18, 2008

I would have worked on this, as I find it’s a great idea, but I can’t seem to get Goosegrade to work. At least, it does not display the mistakes I’ve tried to correct in the user interface. The tabs/links “Your corrections” does not lead anywhere and I can’t see what I’ve already corrected. :( (Linux & Firefox 3)

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By Bob Boynton on November 18th, 2008:
I believe it works like — you propose a change, and someone else either does or does not make the change. Of course, that may not be the problem; I cannot be quite sure from your description of how it is or is not working.

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By notafish on Nov 18, 2008

Well I proposed changes and I would like to see 1) if they have been integrated into the database – and I supposed proposed to the author. 2) which changes I proposed three days/weeks ago, so that I can a) make sure I don’t say the same thing twice b) see if they have been implemented

At this stage, when I log in Goosegrade, I have nothing, no history of my proposed changes, I can’t look at them again. There is a link “your correction” in the Goosegrade interface, but it returns nothing to me (although I have proposed changes with the text box).
Hope it’s clearer :)

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By Ben G on Dec 2, 2008

@notafish – agree. i have filed a few corrections here and there over the past few weeks but haven’t noticed *any* of them being used. going to goosegrade i can’t see my corrections so it’s hard to know if they’ve even arrived – so i’m not risking spending a weekend going through the whole nextweb archive.

oops, just realized it’s past dec 1st anyway :)

i like the idea of this goosegrade thing but it really needs some work before it’s comfortable for the correctors imho.

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Dec 5, 2008

Hi Ben G and Notafish. Thanks for the comments and of course your copy-editing efforts! I’ve been using Goosegrade in a slightly different way. Here’s how:

- You correct something, I receive an email.
- I send the correction to the author of the post. He or she changes the error and learns from it

But now I realize I’ll have to browse to Goosegrade.com to let you know that the change has actually been made. Sorry about that. I hope you’re still eager to keep us sharp and improve our English.

(the announcement about the winner is coming soon!)

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By Ben G on December 5th, 2008:
Hi EJP,

Your post doesn’t really address my ‘complaint’ but that’s ok, as you don’t seem to be using my submissions either ;-)

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