Guilty as charged. We sometimes need a helping hand from a copy editor here and there, because we are not native English speakers, but want to write in English just because its the global lingua franca. Now there’s Wordy, a Danish startup, to help out. We saw Wordy already present in Copenhagen back in June at the ArcticEvening event we held there. Back then they were still in closed beta and only now have opened up.
Here’s a presentation (video below; start at 00:23:20) from Wordy, when they were at LeWeb last week.
I would almost consider using the service if 1) we would not have already partnered with our own and 2) the pace at which you many times publish a blog like ours does not allow the luxury of long cycle times for copy editors (even though Wordy lets you set the delivery time you like, say for 15 minutes or less). I see the value for lets say a research oriented media or someone looking for riding the ‘fast food content’ wave, pushing out how-to articles and optimizing for Google, but for anyone who’s even remotely thinking of publishing breaking news, Wordy, or any other copy editing service, is just too slow.
Wordy has currently 71 copy editors working at the service. They take €12 for 400 words of which the editor keeps 85%, while Wordy gets a 15% commission. Something that’s very interesting and might bring a lot more business for Wordy is the fact that they are building plug-ins for all the major publishing platforms, including the one we use, namely WordPress. Just as the judges at LeWeb, I don’t know the market size for such a service, but I know that if Wordy would tweak their offering towards being part of this, the market would shot right up and all of a sudden they’d be part of the future of journalism. Sad, but true. This is where we’re heading.
Arch Red Oy
Lumi Group Oy
iasy
Dear Ville
Thank you for your great feedback on wordy.com. Leweb was a great experience for us, especially close integration with multiple publishing platforms seems to make a lot of sense to people. Just a few quick comments to your post:
- One of the key elements in making Wordy a success is keeping turnaround times (‘cycle times’) as short as possible. We are securing this by acquiring copy-editors from all major time zones, as well as matching number of jobs with number of copy-editors. As you note we launched last Monday with 71 professional and highly skills editors. This roughly translates into a monthly output of 682k words (23k blog posts of 300 words). There will be at least 200 editors on Wordy by the end of Q1 2010, and 500 editors by the end of Q2 2010.
- For publishers with a ‘first to web’-strategy (e.g. breaking news sites) our plugin strategy is very relevant. E.g. in WordPress you are free to publish your post un-edited, and send it off to Wordy for post-publish editing. This means two things: you are first with breaking news, and first with fantastically written breaking news. The turnaround time for 300 words is approximately 15-20 minutes which makes it hard for even Google to pick up your initial errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation and structure. We think this will be a great service for news-publishers – and actually, it is the standard workflow of most breaking news sites today. So please look out for the WordPress plugin being launched this week.
As you noted it is still early days, but judging by the amount of feedback we are getting from users and editors Wordy definitely has a shot at becoming part of the future of journalism – and many, many other kinds of publishing for that matter.
We might not advertise it right now, but the first 100 words are for free, so please feel free to try us out. Happy publishing!
Anders, like the post-publish editing option. smart thinking. post first, edit later.