Have you ever wished that you could have someone edit your blog posts for typos, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes? Most of us aren't lucky enough to have someone dedicated to catching and fixing our every mistake.

Rather than asking one person to edit for you, why not effectively enlist the help of all of your blog's readers? That's what the folks at Brave New Code figured, anyway, when they decided to create the gooseGrade WordPress plugin.

The concept is simple: install the gooseGrade plugin on your site. Then when readers are visiting your site and they see something that could be corrected, they click on a Grade This button on your site and enter the correction they believe should be made. As the site's owner you have the final say as to what changes to apply, so this isn't a tool that is going to let people insert spam all over your site.

While the concept is interesting, I have doubts that people will take the time to edit someone else's work online, in particular I have doubts that people will take the time to understand that they even have the capability of suggesting edits. This tool would have to be baked-in to a major blogging platform like WordPress.com or TypePad before I think enough people would understand what is going on to actually make use of it.

I kind of wish that it was, actually, because the idea is appealing. It's just going to take a lot for this idea to reach the critical mass it would need to become successful.

[via Panache]

If you love writing, but hate the grunt work of blogging - like inserting relevant links, tags, and images, Zemanta might be for you. It's available as an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a plug-in for Wordpress or Movable Type, and it automatically adds some useful stuff to your blog posts in progress on most of the major blogging platforms. It suggests links and applies them to the relevant words in your post with one click, and it also provides tags and a gallery of Creative-Commons-licensed Flickr photos you can drop in.

Zemanta currently supports Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, TypePad and Blogger, so the majority of blogs should be able to make use of it. It might be too blunt an instrument if you've got a really specific linking scheme going on at your blog, but for a post like this one, it came in handy: it automatically linked the word Zemanta to zemanta.com. Hey, we were going to do that by hand anyway. More importantly, it also grabs links to stories from places like CNN, the New York Times, and Technorati.

[via WebWare]