GooseGrade promotes YOU to copy editor

Since most of our editors aren’t native English speakers, we’ve been obsessed with spelling and grammar. Every time we hit the publish button, we secretly hope no errors have slipped in. Next to being really careful, this fear also translated in some posts about 2.0 spelling tools. Like Spellr.us, an Australia-based service that remotely monitors your blog or website and send you updates when it finds errors and typos. They launched at TechCrunch 50.

Last week, long time Next Web reader Bob Boynton sent me a tool that has a new and effective approach to this spelling problem. GooseGrade crowdsources copyediting to readers. That’s right, everybody can easily correct grammar, spelling, factual, or style errors. Isn’t that a great idea?

Every time a reader corrects something, the GooseGrade of a post drops a bit and the GooseGrade of the part-time copy editor increases. Founder John Brooks Pounders told Cnet how it works:

“GooseGrade does rate the ‘crowd.’ Each user has an accuracy rating for how often their corrections are accepted. We find this by dividing corrections accepted by total corrections posted. This should help keep spamming at bay and also provide an easy way for the author to know whether or not to listen to the grader. ex. ‘joewxboy is correct 95% of the time.'”

Here’s a video about GooseGrade:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5euDQPq434]

The service will launch next week in private beta. I’ll definitely install it on The Next Web Blog, which seems to be a matter of just inserting a few lines of code. Then I’ll invite you, dear reader, to act like a copy editor every once in a while.