The Internet has obviously made global writing collaboration a relatively easy task. While I published my print magazine in the early- to mid-1990s, I drove all over the place, for each monthly issue, to meet with contributors and editors, and pick up mostly hand-written articles. Collaborating was a time-intensive process.

Most of my writers didn’t have typewriters, let alone computers. My magazine was only really distributed in the Southern Ontario regions of Toronto to as far west as Windsor (across the river from Detroit). But because we covered global issues and global music, copies managed to make their way into the United States, parts of Europe and even Australia and New Zealand. I even had a contributor that wrote band profiles and CD reviews from New Zealand. Of course, she had to send stuff by snail mail back then. I spent more than half the production time each month typing in everyone else’s articles, or editing the few that gave me floppy disks.

Now, it’s so much easier to collaborate around the world. All my own steady blogging - while earning me little in ad revenue - has recently resulted in some paying gigs with other blogs. Besides my own blogs, I’m writing for 3 blog editors - 2 from the US and one in Asia. (I live in Canada, with occasional jaunts to the US.) This amounts to 4 blogs, with possibly more in the future. I’m also hoping that I’ll eventually be able to actually make a living as an “online writer” - a transition over the past dozen years from programmer to webmaster to technical writer to unemployed starving artist, and hopefully to successful blogger.

While some of my writing requirements are pretty specific, some are a bit more open-ended. What I thought might help my editors is an “article bank” of blog posts. So I set up a subdomain on one of my existing domains and password-protected every entry. Each collaborating editor will have access to any of the posts. Because of the extra “role management” features and efficient post-editing panel in WordPress 2, I decided to go with WP 2. (Most of my blogs are on WP 1.5.2.)

Once my collaborators register on the article bank blog, I promote their role to “editor”. While I wish there was a role between editor and writer, I trust the people I’m currently working with and am not worried that they may accidentally delete an item, or take a post that has been published elsewhere. (I’m not yet sure if I want to run a non-exclusive article bank, where anyone can republish any article for the right price. At any rate, this process is temporary, and a collaboration plugin is in the works.)

Because I have always written about a very wide range of topics, I’m not one to easily focus on a single blog. It may have harmed me initially, since many of my blogs go neglected on occasion, but I cannot write any other way without major discipline. And then the writing ceases to be enjoyable. This way, I’m hoping to rectify things by writing for others for pay, as well as for myself.

Now, I can surf and research on the Internet, and write whatever comes to mind - my natural way of writing. I then post each article to my article bank - even if it is intended for one of my blogs. In addition to assigning the post a fairly general topic category, I also assign it an “__UNPUBLISHED” category. That way, blog editors that do not have me writing very specific posts can subscribe to the web feed for the __UNPUBLISHED posts. (Some blogging platforms will not have category-specific web feeds. WP does, which is why I favour it, amongst other reasons.)

Presently, an editor that wants to publish one of the articles in the bank lets me know and I use my account on their blog to post it. I then change the status to __PUBLISHED, on the article bank copy. If no one wants it - usually because it’s not suitable to their topic coverage, I publish it on one of my own blogs, which tend to be more general. I also have a __RESERVED category, which means that a post is for someone specific - so look but don’t touch.

Setting up an article bank has some great organizational benefits, if you intend to be a professional online writer (blogger). In addition to being able to quickly search a single website (your bank) to determine if you’ve blogged about something previously, you also have a record of when you wrote something for someone else. Everything is one place - especially important if you write for multiple blogs. (Of course, I could very well have set up a private blog on my laptop for the same purpose, but then the ability to collaborate is not there.)

Now keep in mind that because the posts are password-protected, none of the search engines can get into them. They’ll be private articles. And the RSS/ Atom web feeds will only contain the post title. But if you are earning revenue from your article bank, you will not want bots in there anyway.

You now have a record of each article. If you have an agreement with an editor to let them have exclusive rights for, say, a year, then you can easily keep track of such details from a single site. You could even implement a reporting plugin for your article bank which shows you details and statistics on where your articles have been posted, frequencies, and whether the exclusivity period is up. This is relatively easy to do because WP 2 (and WP 1.5.2, by the way) allows you to add custom fields to each post.

Finally, assuming you have a calendar displayed on your article bank blog, you can see at a glance whether or not you are meeting a daily writing quota - something I strive for but do not always feel I’ve accomplished since my posts are on numerous blogs. Being able to see that you did indeed writing something every day in a particular month helps in the psychological side of the writing process. (Does it need to be said that many of us writers are an emotional lot?)

[Aside: My articles are currently not carrying a copyright notice because I’m internally debating whether I want any of my blogs (or someone else’s) showing such a notice in each and every post. I used to do that with most of my posts, but stopped the practice a few months ago. Under normal copyright law, my articles are automatically copyrighted anyway. (For more about protecting yourself from copyright violations and plagiarism, visit Jonathan Bailey’s Plagiarism Today website.)]

My article bank collaboration process is currently manual, but I’m sketching out the details for an automation plugin. This plugin would allow editors to select one or more articles, pay for them via Paypal (depending on the arrangement I have with them), and have the articles automatically posted to their blog. The latter is provided their blogging platform allows posting by secret email address. Once this plugin is in place, purchasing editors only need to be registered on the article bank blog as a “contributor” instead of as an “editor” - reducing the possibility of inadvertent article deletions.

I’m hoping that such a plugin would encourage people to write more, and even build up a demand for their articles, and thus help them achieve higher earnings for their writing. I’ll be writing about this collaboration system in the future. Once I get this plugin working - whenever that is - I’ll be releasing it free of charge.

Note: Part 2 and subsequent posts for this series may not appear for quite some time. I’m working on the architecture design before I start coding the plugin.

Tags: blogging, problogging, multi-blogging, online collaboration, writing, blogging platforms, wordpress