SkypeOut: You can but time as you go, or pay a monthly fee for unlimited calling within your country. I pay $3 a month, or $24 US a year.

SkypeIn: For $60 US a year, I get unlimited incoming calls via Skype. I can take calls at my computer, using a Skype-enabled phone, or even on my Blackberry using a free application called iSkoot (which supports several different phones, not just Blackberries).

So basically I have a fully-functioning phone number with unlimited calling anywhere within the US for $84 US a year. Not too bad! I even have a cheap little handset attached to my computer, so I don’t have to wear a headset all the time in case anyone calls. The handset looks and acts just like a real phone, except it’s plugged into the computer instead of into the wall.

Skype lets me do business in my home office without relying on my mobilephone and without having to put in a second land line. With SkypeIn, I even have a phone number I can put on my business card.

That’s a pretty good deal, I think – but there are a wide range of plugins for Skype that allow it to do much, much more.

The one I use at least once or twice a week is CallGraph. CallGraph is a free plugin that records every call I make or receive via Skype. Normally it runs in the background, but a control panel pops up as soon as Skype becomes active. I use this for recording interviews with sources, as well as the occasional podcast interview. (Note: Be sure to ask your otehr party as soon as possible if they mind if you record the call – in many cases it won’t matter, but in some states – and I assume countries – it’s against the law to record a call without permission even if the person recording it is not in that state.)

Another valuable plugin is called PamFax and, as you can probably guess, it allows you to send faxes via Skype. PamFax is free, but it charges a small amount per page to actually send faxes – fortunately, it iwll use your existing SkypeOut credit if you have any, or you can deposit a small amount directly to PamFax. An online dashboard allows you to review your sent faxes from anywhere. PamFax allows me to send faxes even though there’s no landline in my office – ideal for returning signed contracts to editors and clients.

SKype is an incredibly powerful platform. There are a whole range of plugins for collaboration, for example, that effectively turn Skype into a teleconferencing system. I don’t use any of them, since I rarely collaborate online, but for people making presentations to clients, there are at least a dozen choices. And the Skype developer community seems to be growing – who knows what we’ll see next. If you haven’t gotten set up with Skype yet, make sure to download the application today – even if you don’t use it to replace your landline phone, you can still communicate via voice chat with other Skype users for free.

And it sounds really good.

Here’s how it works — you start reading a story, choosing options to move the story forward, and working your way though other people’s contributions until you reach a part that hasn’t been written or hasn’t been provided with options to move the story forward, what they call a “fragment”. Then, you start writing. Your segment will become one branch of the story’s structure, and others can rate it. Once it’s written, you only have 60 minutes to make changes before it’s locked for good (so that others aren’t caught out using elements in their new branches that you’ve deleted from the branch they’re building on).

Protagonize seems to have built up a fun, active community of writers — there are hundreds of stories and authors working on them. While it probably isn’t the place to write your next best-seller, if you’re looking for a fun way to connect with other authors, Protagonize might be just the thing.

Protagonize (Free)

Better yet, PlotBot allows you and any number of collaborators to log in and work on the same screenplay at the same time. You can set your script to “Private”, allowing in only the people you’ve invited, or “Public”, letting you set up open projects that anyone can contribute to. You can even do a “Showdown”, letting people write their own screenplays to a prompt you provide, useful for competitions or just plain fun.

Creating a new project is easy. Once you’re logged in, click “New Project” and you’ll be asked to name your project and write a description. The next page allows you to assign a copyright, offering your choice of “All rights reserved” or any Creative Commons license.

PlotBot offers lots of great options to you can add to your project — you can add a project blog, write style guidelines, and add reference documents and character descriptions. The interface basically walks you through the process of writing — first you create an outline, the you add scenes, and then you flesh out each scene. There’s also a section for notes.

In the screenwriting section proper, you are given options to write sluglines, actions, or dialogue. Each presents you with a text entry field that offers only what you need for that kind of line — for example, the dialogue lines have a field for the name of the speaker and a box for their line. Sluglines offer a drop-box to select either “INT” or EXT”. As you add different types of text, it’s automatically formatted for you.

To edit text, you just click on it and it immediately becomes live, with whatever options are available for that kind of line. Every line is stamped with its author and the time of the last edit, and you can attach comments to each separate line. It’s all very slick and fun to use.

Finished screenplays or drafts can be printed directly from the browser, downloaded as a Rich Text File (that can be opened in any word processor without losing its formatting), or downloaded in XML, which the programmers admit is useless at the moment — but since it’s a standard, it’s assumed that future applications will be able to use it somehow.

All in all, PlotBot is a very well-conceived and well-executed application. It may not be as flexible as your desktop version of Final Draft (or even your free version of Rough Draft), but it’s fun, available everywhere, and offers collaboration features that even Final Draft can’t boast. And, as a final note, you can set the interface to any of over a dozen languages (though some translations are more complete than others) — including Pirate! Arrr, that be good!

PlotBot (Free)

Regular readers have seen me rave about Adobe’s online word processor Buzzword before. Written in Flash, Buzzword provides a writing environment so slick that it’s actually inspired me to write more!

This week, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, folding Buzzword and a couple of other projects they’ve been working on into a somewhat integrated interface. The total package represents a nice start to what looks set to become a major player in the office suite field.

Overview of Acrobat.com

Acrobat.com is a free service offered by Adobe consisting, at this point, of 5 sub-applications: Buzzword, the online word processor; ConnectNow, an online meeting space; Create PDF, a file conversion application; Share, a file sharing system; and My Files, an online storage space. All the programs run in Flash, as you’d expect this being Adobe and all, and should run in any modern web browser (including Firefox 3) and on either Windows, Mac, or Linux (although Linux users will have to follow special instructions to upload files to the service).

All of the services are technically still in Beta, although I’ve been using Buzzword for well over half a year with no problems. Since the applications in Acrobat.com consist of a mix of acquired third-party applications and apps developed in-house, the integration between them isn’t very consistent — for example, you still can’t access Buzzword documents directly from Share or MyFiles, a feature I hope is in the works.

To use Acrobat.com, you need a free Adobe account. If you already use Adobe’s other services, like Adobe Exchange (Adobe’s repository for add-ons for Creative Studio apps like Photoshop and Illustrator), you already have an Adobe ID. If, like me, you are a former Buzzword user, Acrobat.com will walk you through the process of converting your former login into an Adobe ID — it only takes a few seconds.

The Applications

Like I said, Acrobat.com consists — for now — of five separate applications:

• Buzzword: A gorgeously-designed word processor, Buzzword offers features about on par with a rich text editor like Wordpad, such as tables, images, bulleted lists, and text formatting and highlighting. Documents can be shared, with the author deciding whether others can only read the document, annotate it, or edit it directly.

  With the release of Acrobat.com, Buzzword gains the ability to export as PDF, which it does very well (this is Adobe, after all). Still lacking is support for standard fonts (the system comes with several custom Adobe fonts, which are beautiful, but are replaced by boring fonts when you export a document from the system) which is supposedly in the works. Also somewhat disappointing is the fact that you can’t, as yet, save Buzzword documents to your MyFiles or Share account — you have to download the document (losing your gorgeous fonts in the process) and re-upload it to those services.

• ConnectNow: A fairly full-featured webconferencing app, ConnectNow allows you to share your screen, chat, send live video, share files, and collaborate using a whiteboard. Each meeting space is assigned a unique URL that you can invite attendees to visit; email invites can also be sent from within the system, but that just triggers your default email program to open a new email with the link already inserted.

  Some form of contact management would be nice, so a list of potential attendees could be consulted and invited quickly. Meetings are limited to three people, including the host, which rather limits the usefulness of the app, but I assume Adobe will increase that limit as the system becomes better established.

• Create PDF: This does about what it says. You can upload up to 5 documents, and Adobe will convert them to PDF. The conversion is straight across; you can’t add new features, edit tet, or do anything else. In other words, this is not a replacement for Acrobat.Actually, the Create PDF apps is just a quick link into the PDF conversion screen in Share; your shared documents will appear at the bottom, and the new PDFs will be saved to the Share system.
• Share: Acrobat.com’s document sharing service offers a slick way to send and receive documents. Documents you’ve uploaded or received via Share can be previewed online (although I found it couldn’t preview Word 2007’s .docx format); a button click opens the Create PDF dialogue for quick conversion; you can generate a direct link to any document that can be opened by anyone; and documents can be embedded into web pages.
• MyFiles: Adobe’s file storage service offers 5 GB of free online storage for most kinds of documents and images, Adobe product filetypes (including Flash), and zip archives. You can’t upload media files, fonts, executables, and several other file types.The options available in MyFiles are exactly the same as those in Share, which makes me curious about why they are presented as two separate apps.

Acrobat.com On the AIR

Acrobat.com finally brings offline functionality to apps like Buzzword, via Adobe’s AIR toolset. The Acrobat.com AIR application allows you to use Acrobat.com apps without using your browser, making for a quicker overall experience. SInce the app is running on your desktop, you can drag and drop files directly to MyFiles or Share. It’s unclear, though, whether you can use the AIR application without an Internet connection (and I’m too lazy to disconnect mine and see!) and whether that’s a feature that could be enabled.

In my tests, though, Buzzword opened in a separate browser window, rather than within the AIR application. Hopefully that will be worked out soon!

Overall Thoughts

Acrobat.com is a good next step for Adobe. I’m glad to finally be able to save PDFs from Buzzword, and the AIR application makes Buzzword an especially compelling word processor for everyday use.

What I hope is that this “next step” isn’t Adobe’s “last step”. Acrobat.com has the potential to be an amazing online/off-line, available anywhere, full-featured productivity suite. The addition of a presentation designer (SlideRocket?), database program (Blist?), and spreadsheet (Blist, again?), plus a couple of other niceties would make Acrobat.com a real contender against the bulky and expensive MS Office — and even against OpenOffice.org’s free suite.

For now, Buzzword and the 5 GB of free storage offered by MyFiles are more than compelling on their own. The sharing works well, though I’ve had little occasion to use it (email works fine for me, as it happens). It’s so easy to create a PDF from just about any file these days that the Create PDF service is hardly necessary, though it’s nice to have the ability built in across the Acrobat.com suite. All in all, Acrobat.com is a beautiful, elegant suite that’s still a little random and haphazard but seems to be coming together nicely. I expect great things!

The web makes working with other writers and/or clients easier than ever. Gone are the days of posting typescripts of chapters back and forth between co-authors — now you can log in and instantly see what your collaborator has written or changed. And if you don’t like what you see, you can easily check the history of your documents, reverting to earlier versions if something goes horribly awry.

There are three basic approaches to web-based collaboration:

1. Live interaction: You and your collaborator(s) gather around a virtual whiteboard and add, edit, and delete in real time.
2. Online revision: You work on a document online and give permission to selected others to see and modify your work.
3. Document management: You upload a file (or create one) and allow others to download it, edit it, and re-upload their changes.

For writers, the easiest and most likely is online revision, but let’s look at solutions for all three.

Live collaboration

Live collaboration systems allow several authors to gather virtually around a single document, discuss it, and make changes that are instantly seen by others (usually highlighted a different color for each writer). The technology isn’t very advanced, yet, but there are a few applications that offer this ability.

• Gobby: Intended for programmers, Gobby is a free program that allows several users to make changes and see others changes. Each user’s changes are highlighted in the color they select. The bottom pane is a live chatroom. The file format is text-only, so you can’t add formatting like bold or italics. Runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

  Gobby is still under development, so expect to see improvements along the way.

• SynchroEdit: SynchroEdit is an online collaboration space, allowing several authors to work on a document at the same time. Each author’s changes are highlighted a different color. Allows basic formatting (bold, italic, text align, headers). Includes a chat pane in the lower right hand corner. When the document is finished, you can have it emailed to you; at the moment, it comes in the body of your email. Hopefully they’ll add text exporting to typical file formats as they develop it.

  SynchroEdit is also under development, and at the moment runs on any operating system but can only be accessed using Firefox or its derivatives.

Online revision

Websites that allow you to invite others to revise work have become quite common as the technology has matured. Almost any online word processor will allow this, though two users cannot work on the same document at the same time (unlike the live systems described above). Here, I’ll focus on only a few.

• Google Docs: Google Docs is the current king of the online word processing space. Documents can be uploaded or created online, and you cna invite any number of partners to view or edit your documents. Clicking the “Revisions” tab will show you all previous versions of a document. When finished, the document can be downloaded in several formats, including Word doc and Adobe pdf, or published directly to the web. Simple, easy to use, and with several gigabytes of free online storage, you can keep an entire career’s worth of writing safe and secure online.

  Other online word processors like Zoho Writer, ThinkFree, and the text editor Writeboard (which offers no formatting options) work much the same way; all are free.

• Adobe Buzzword: I could have included Buzzword in the list of online word processors above, but I like it so much I decided to give it its own entry in this list. Buzzword is a gorgeous online word processor with some pretty good sharing features. Click “Share” in the lower left-hand corner, and you can invite collaborators as co-authors (allows full editing privileges), reviewers (allows commenting), or readers (allows reading only, no changes). Click the “History” icon in the lower right (it looks like a Greek statue), and you can instantly view previous versions of the document. Insert a cursor into any line and a comment bubble comes up in the right-hand margin; click it and leave comments. The same document can be open by several people at the same time; changes are collated together automatically. Buzzword’s collaboration features complement nicely it’s really powerful and attractive word processor.
• WriteWith: A full-fledged integrated collaborating system, WriteWith allows you to upload documents or create them online, edit them, assign and track tasks (with deadlines) to collaborators, and save finished documents or drafts to your computer in Word format. Changes are highlighted with a different color for each user. You can easily see who is editing a document at any given moment, and leave notes for future writers. If I could get Buzzword wrapped in WriteWith’s project management tools, I’d be totally happy!

Check-in, check-out: document management online

Document management systems allow users to check out a document, edit it, and check it back in. Well-established among corporate users, these systems are only starting to come online in stripped-down versions. There are lots of complicated systems you ahve to install and maintain yourself, but Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace promises to make much of this functionality available to everyone.

• Microsoft Office Live Workspace: Invite-only at the moment, this extension of the Office Live program allows you to upload documents and share them online, setting permissions as to who can read, download, or edit your documents. Revision history is tracked at the site. You can preview documents online, but can only edit them by downloading them into MS Office — fortunately, Microsoft offers a toolbar add-in for Office that makes this simple.
• You can also use project management software like BaseCamp or Wrike to store and share files; like MS Workspaces, you’ll download them, edit them, and re-upload them. However, these systems rarely offer any sort of revision tracking. On the other hand, they offer useful features like todo lists, milestones, task assignments, and scheduling.

Of course, you could just email files back and forth, which isn’t an entirely impractical way to collaborate if you’re comfortable suing Word’s “track changes” function (or the equivalent in your word processor), and you’re using the same word processor as your collaborators.

If you do anything more complex than reviewing what others have written and sending your won writing for review, you should take a look at shifting from email to an online system designed for collaboration. You don’t have to worry about what software to use, or about someone forgetting to send an email or attach a file, or about getting lost in the sea of tracked changes. Instead, you can just focus on doing your writing — which is a pretty good deal, I think!