Web Excursions are select bookmarks from my travels around the interwebs, because I'm always thinking about you while discovering other people's cool stuff. You mean that much to me. You can see all of my (public) bookmarks on my LinkDing, and visit the bookmarks archive for curated lists across the last few years.

Web excursions brought to you in partnership with MindMeister, the best collaborative mind mapping software out there.

This is the “collaborative text editors” edition. It’s a problem I’ve been looking into for a while now, and would love to hear about any additions you have to the list. I’m leaving comments open on this one, so feel free to pimp your favorite solutions.

While I’m partial to Markdown and plain text in this quest, I’m open to other non-Word options.

Collaborative text editors

Draft
Still my favorite, and constantly growing with new features and active development. I’m using it to collaborate on a book right now, as well as a means to share my longer blog pieces with editors and proofreaders.
Typewrite
Another one to add to the list. Nice keyboard shortcuts for Markdown editing, and great collaboration features with merging and differentials.
Penflip
Start projects, invite collaborators and share public documents. I love the interface, but haven’t done any extensive testing with it yet.
Gingko App
A way to collaborate on document structure using a “Tree” system. Good keyboard navigation and some interesting features.
GitDocs
I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s a Dropbox-style document collaboration system using Git. It looks like it would be automated enough to get non-technical writers involved without too much hassle.
CriticMarkup
It’s not live collaboration, but with the right tools it’s possible to do some interesting things. MultiMarkdown Composer makes generating the markup, previewing and accepting/rejecting changes simple, and Marked makes it easy for all parties to see changes and before/after views.
Quip
I have to include Quip (for iOS), despite it being a rich text editor with a proprietary format. The collaboration features are excellent.
hackpad
This is a late addition, I forgot about it when first editing this post. Hackpad is a web-based rich text editor with excellent collaboration features. Thanks to Mr Ka for reminding me.
Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language–Wolfram Blog
For users like me, this video should come with a clear “pornography” warning.

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