gooseGrade has a unique and valuable perspective when it comes to blogging: Unlike traditional media, blogs are lacking the invisible army of copy editors carefully making sure everything that is written is also written accurately and well. Today they are releasing a WordPress plugin that invites your audience to help proofread your blog. GooseGrade got some press from RWW and others last October.
Honestly, we think this is a really great idea. We have seen countless blog posts from sites great and small (even our site on occasion) that contain spelling, punctuation, and factual errors. To many readers each blemish of this type removes a ‘reputation point’ from that blog’s score. The more responsible sites will quickly catch these errors and correct them, but without the expert eye of a trained copy editor, sometimes they can still go overlooked.
Here’s where the gooseGrade WordPress plugin comes in. Extending gooseGrade’s philosophy of harnessing the power of the Internet to help catch and correct these issues, this plugin closes the loop on WordPress stand-alone blogs, allowing submitted corrections to be seen from within the WordPress dashboard. The corrections list is very Wikipedia-like, showing the original block of text on the left, and the corrected block on the right. One more click and the edit is committed to the post and you are done. Brilliant!
If you have a hosted WordPress blog, and you weren’t a newspaper writer or editor in a previous life, we recommend you check out the gooseGrade plugin. And keep in mind that gooseGrade has a code snippet you can drop in to your site’s HTML if you use something other than WP, like Blogger or TypePad.
