Getting Organized with Backpackit
One of the things that I want to get going is a collaborative journalism platform. The system will have a couple of primary features.
Article Collaboration
- You create a “Article Stub”
- You add reference material
- You collaborate on the article
- You maintain a workflow (data gathering, writing, draft, published, revision1, revision2)
RSS Aggregator
- You can add however many RSS feeds to the Aggregator
- You can tag specific articles in the aggregator with keywords which could pertain to upcoming stories.
- You can select a specific quote from the article and tag it for future use in an article
In a previous post I made a list of a bunch of “getting organized” tools, I’ve looked through most of them, but none of them really do what I want.
However, the best I could find was backpackit. The things I like the best are writeboards and price ($5/month). I could have just used a regular wiki, but since I was colaborating with a couple other people the inteface is VERY easy to understand and use.
This is how I’m using backpackit.
- Create a page for the project
- Share the page with people who will be collaborating on the project
- For each article we’re going to write I create a writeboard and add it to that page.
- Everyone colaborates on the article by adding data, wikipedia style.
Obviously this doesn’t really work the way I need it to, and there are always “stop editing I’ve got an update” messages flying around IM, but for now it seems to work.
If anyone has the time/energy/skills to create my collaborative journalism platform PLEASE let me know. I’d be VERY interested in working with you or sponsoring your work.
Yes, and I’ve got referral links so if you decide to sign up with the paid for version I get 3 free weeks of service!!! Woot! 
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Its weird coming across this post, i’ve been thinking/planning on something very similiar for writing articles. Ive tried about every way i can think of not to have to write my own tool. Its so closely related to a wiki except with a work flow that Ive tried adapting several and stopped for various reasons… mostly my lack of patience with bending someone elses code to my will.
Looks like its time to start planning.
Doug Hill
A nice website is: http://www.socialtext.com/
Man, what a well set-up website!
YES,VERY GOOD WEBSITE!
Thank you, I just wanted to give a greeting and tell you I enjoyed reading your material.
Luggage Sets…
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you….