Lake Neuron

If you’ve ever used the online word processor originally known as Writely which is now part of Google Documents, you may want to check out BuzzWord, a similar type of product which is now owned by Adobe. I found out about it from j.bentley, who has a great review of the program.

Online word processors are great for collaboration — different people can access a document and make changes to it, no matter what platform they’re using or where they’re located, and they can usually leave sticky notes or comments attached to the document. They can also be an alternative for someone who wants to work on a document from various locations but doesn’t want to carry it along with them on a laptop or thumb drive for some reason. They can even be a way of backing up an important document, since the documents are hosted on the online word processor’s servers instead of on your computer. You can create a document in BuzzWord, of course, but you can also import documents created in a traditional word processor. (One quibble: at present, BuzzWord can only import Word or rich text documents, not OpenOffice documents, which Google accepts. So I have to use OpenOffice to save something in Word format before uploading it.)

BuzzWord has a Flash-heavy interface which is definitely more fun and flashy (no pun intended) than Google Documents. It also seems to take larger documents, since a document of mine which grew too large for Google Documents uploaded to BuzzWord with no problem.

It’s worth checking out and playing with, even if you don’t use it on a regular basis. You may need it at some point in the future to share a document with others.

Tags : buzzword | collaboration | google documents | word processors