Released today, Web Collaborator is a new online collaboration tool which allows online groups to work effectively around the same document. A wiki at its foundations, Web Collaborator has been designed with maximum ease-of-use in mind, and with an extra layer of security and control over who gets to contribute and who gets only to read the output of the collaborative process.

Smooth, readable and elegantly designed, Web Collaborator is free for everyone while costing something to those who want to install its technology behind the firewall of their own organization and hook it up to their LDAP directory.

Lucas Carlson is the man behind Web Collaborator. He wrote to me:

"What the site does is allow you to easily collaborate with others in any sort of writing project, be it a paper, a grant, a proposal, a thesis, poetry.

What I did with Web Collaborator was fuse the idea of a blog and a wiki... the blog for discussion related to the project, and the wiki to edit the project and keep track of revisions.

What makes Web Collaborator different from other wikis out there though is that with Web Collaborator, you can set up a private wiki where you control the administrators, the writers, and even those who can read-only.

Furthermore, you can have all collaborators agree to a non-disclosure
agreement before seeing any part of the collaboration.

In the past, written collaborations have ranged from somewhat cumbersome to nearly impossible, especially if more than two people work on the project at the same time. Web Collaborator becomes the middle-man in these collaborative projects, keeping a backup of every revision of your paper.

You can even see word for word, letter for letter what changed between any two given revisions or even download any version of your
collaboration as a PDF file."

Web Collaborator adds a new level of usability to online project collaboration and it does it without adding complexity, resource intensive applications, or adding new arcane control interfaces to our daily tools. As in Tim Berners Lee original vision, Web Collaborator, should bring us all a step closer to his dream of easy document collaboration and sharing that we have yet to experience on the Web.

Web Collaborator automatically generates an RSS feed containing each update to the collaborative effort.

All platforms supported. Web-based.
Try it out now.

Get a basic introduction to wikis and blogs and their limitations for online collaboration.