As we are working through our workflow on how Linking Life is going to work, we thought one way to do it might be to work on posts together. The idea was good. The outcome, not so much. As soon as we tried to take 30 minutes to do it, we all broke out into an argument defending our ideas on why multi-author posts would or would not work. Some of us got upset and stared at our screens, some of us participated and others went back to their regular work. So this is what we came up with.
Reason 1 – Great minds think alike- we all have great minds, it is bound to get redundant.
Reason 2: One person will always be stubborn in saying “this won’t work”. He will say things like, “nobody will read this” and “this is a dumb way to do things” instead of just working towards getting it done, they will sit back, kick their feet up and complain.
Reason 3: Because it’s a waste of time that nobody will read.
Reason 4: Everyone will want credit for their own ideas instead of sharing it with the blog as a whole.
Reason 5: People’s writing style or perception is up for debate. If a person doesn’t agree with ones piece, its up for debate. Then, getting frustrated, the person won’t want to post.
Reason 6 – Because you can never know what sort of mood your co-authors will be in, they may be a touch bitchy, which never makes for quality collaboration, unless you are breeding dogs.
Reason 7: – WordPress and every other blogging engine that we know of has no default functionality to have multi-author support on one blog post. They assume that every post is only written by one author.
Reason 8: Who gets the final say? Are you going to put into brackets every single disagreement? Or make tables of for and against? Is their an editor? If there is an editor should they get to be listed as the author and the rest of them as co-authors.
Reason 9 – Some people may not want to be included in a post with another person who is a terrible speller.
Reason 10 – Google Docs doesn’t really work nearly as well or as smooth for multi-live collaboration on one document; not nearly as good as Google Wave. Since we’ve all agreed that the Google Wave has died out for now, that won’t work either.
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What reason was there to even attempt a multi-author post?
Maybe we need to do a post on 10 reasons why you would. We thought we would produce better content overall.