The Acrobat.com Blog

Guest post by Dan Weinstein, Ph.D.

(Dan Weinstein is currently Associate Professor of English at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. There, roughly 1400 miles from his birthplace in New York City, he teaches both writing and web design and researches best practices for computer supported writing instruction.)

One key to good teaching is simply the habit of keeping one’s teaching house in order. Usually, there is quite a bit to keep track of. Documents that range from assignment descriptions to lectures, handouts, and tests need to be created, updated, distributed, archived, and kept ready for access at a moment’s notice (this is particularly true when one is teaching online, which I quite often do).

To minimize the burden of this sort of housekeeping and keep my attention where it should be (on my students), I have devised a system of file management that streamlines my workflow to the point where virtually all I have to think about are the critical human interactions the system exists to support.

To do this, I use two tools in tandem: Buzzword and a spreadsheet. Any garden variety spreadsheet will do, the only requirement being that it support hyperlinks. At the moment I use either OpenOffice.org Calc or Microsoft Excel. If Buzzword were to host a spreadsheet application, I would probably use that.

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Here at Buzzword Central, we’re really excited about the extended sharing capability we added in the latest release. In case you haven’t heard, Buzzword now enables its authors to make their documents accessible by anyone, with or without a Buzzword account, whether or not the others have signed in.

We call these open access documents, and we hope it will not only make Buzzword documents more ubiquitous, but will make sharing of documents easier. Especially in those cases where you have 20 or more people with whom you want to share a document (and the contents aren’t particularly sensitive), you can now just send them the URL to an open access doc and they can read it directly.

So here’s a little experiment in which you can view this blog entry in Buzzword…

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Most crosswords in the daily newspaper are written by freelance constructors who submit proposed puzzles to the various editors. One such constructor is Andrew Greene, the author of this post. When not engaged with his cruciverbalism hobby, Andrew is a developer on the Buzzword team. Most recently he brought you spell checking in 19 different languages.

Guest author: Andrew M. Greene

Many people think of constructing and solving crossword puzzles as a solitary activity. While this may be true for some, there are organizations like the National Puzzlers’ League and events like the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (which was featured in the 2006 movie Wordplay) that bring puzzle solvers and constructors together.

Today’s puzzle in the Wall Street Journal was constructed by a team of three hobbyists who know one another from the National Puzzlers’ League. One lives in Denver, one lives in Vancouver, and I live in Boston. We used Buzzword to collaborate on writing the clues for this puzzle.

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Yesterday, Jonathan Blum of TheStreet posted an entry on his Small Business center column with the evocative title Buzzword Loses Some of Its Charm. This obviously caught the attention of several of us on the Buzzword team.

We’re a little obsessive about customer feedback – the entire team subscribes to the feedback mailing list and reads each message. The reason is not to bask in the overwhelmingly positive responses we receive, but to pay attention to areas where we can improve the product. Our development schedule and priorities are largely determined by what we here from our customers – from the street, so to speak. So when we collectively turned to this article, it was with an honest interest in learning how we could do better.

First the good news…
Though the title is cautionary, much of the article is quite positive. For starters, it indicates that the folks at TheStreet, “have edited dozens of stories and blog items per week with Buzzword.” So we knew two things: they are speaking from experience, and they must appreciate Buzzword to use it so heavily. In fact, the article begins by laying out the case for Buzzword:

Make no mistake: Buzzword is the word-processing, document-handling real deal. For absolutely no upfront cost, you get a fully functional, easy-to-use word processor that edits, stores, marks up and files your documents.

Then he summarizes the enumerated benefits of Buzzword this way:

In many ways, Buzzword is one of the best word processors you can buy (sic). Period.

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There was an interesting post today picked up by my blog alerts from a site called “Criminal Defense Law with an Apple“. The alert for references to Buzzword picked up the post because it contained the following line:

I see no reason to review Adobe’s Buzzword, because we already have really solid solutions for word processing.

This was stated in the context that there were so many other useful new applications emerging on the web, that evaluating “traditional” categories wasn’t worth the effort. We clearly haven’t reached that blog author yet, so let’s be clear again here: writing with Buzzword is something new, it’s not the same as writing in Word. Yes, the keystrokes all translate neatly and in an orderly fashion to letters on the screen. And, as with Word, in time and with enough of these keystrokes, a document emerges that is worthy of sharing.

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