Idea du Jour: Watching Writers Write
May 13th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Here’s my useless idea of the day. What if we could watch live or recorded screencasts of a writer’s screen as they write? The writer–from Stephen King to your favourite local blogger–installs some software on their computer, and it broadcasts the activity in their word processor (or authoring tool of choice) in real time to the web.
Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of Victor Hugo:
It kind of combines Webex and RobotReplay with the popular notion of radical transparency. It sounds banal, but so does Twitter, and people seem to like that.
The technology for this obviously already exists. There’d be a little work in building plugins for MS Word, NotePad,browser forms and whatever else people write in. But other than that it would be simple.
If you’re Stephen King, maybe you offer some kind of premium subscription that enables people to spy on your writing. Hardcore fans, knowing that King usually writes in the morning, would log in to watch him putter away on his latest novel.
Of course, no writer that I know would permit this. As the saying goes, “there are two things you never want to see made, sausage and legislation”. I’d add most forms of writing to that list.