What+is+PiratePad?

Google purchased the company that began Etherpad.com and planned to shut down the service in March 2010. Plans for this closure stirred such strong feelings that Google released the code free of charge in December 2009. The Swedish Pirate Party established PiratePad to use as a collaborative tool to support anonymous policical activism communication.

PiratePad is a web-based collaborative real-time editing tool that allows mutiple authors to edit text documents simultaneously. Uses can see edits in real-time and have the ability to display each authors text in a different color. Each "pad" has it's own URL and anyone whith the URL (and password if you chose to password protect) can edit the pad. A chat room is available so that users can collaborate as they go. The tools available include all basic text editing functions, such as bold, italic, underline, strike out, left and right alignemnt, bullet points, redo and undo. Users can change the view size, import or export files and save revisions. The document(s) created can be downloaded in plain text, HTML, Open Document, Microsoft Word or PDF format. A "timslider" allows users to see the editing history of the pad as it happened.

[|Go Back To FRIT 8530 Class Wiki]