You don't have to write alone.

I am using buzzword to write this blog. Pretty cool really. This started out as a note to a friend on how we can share writing efforts on collaborative web content. Only the people you invite have access to your documents and they can be retrieved from any computer connected to the net without downloading any software. The final docs can be saved locally to your maichine in Rich Text or Word doc formats or copy and pasted into a blog- like I did here.

It is similar in concept to Writely (Now Google Docs) or Zoho Writer, both of which share the same type of features. Zoho has more in the way of features for bloggers to automatically publish to their blog site of choice and the ability to write offline and later sync to the web version. I haven't compared all the features of each but I like the clean simplicity of this one. Google Docs has a few other cool features. For example, you can send a note from your mail and it is automatically converted to a Google Doc. In the world of Web 2.0 you will be seeing tons of stuff like this out there. I would be interested to hear of the things you have already stumbled upon.

Dark Room is a worthy contender for a collaborative online web word processor. Did I mention it is pretty? The flash functionality doesn't seem to allow you to move graphics around easily- so forget about using it as a cheap layout tool. But it will work for collaborating on web content, blogs, or just about anything else. And it includes the ability to add the all-important "link luv" that make blogs and web content so appealing. Links make pages come alive and make it easier for search engines to love you.

On the other end of the spectrum... if you are looking for a simple, unobstructed writing environment for the PC, check out Dark Room. Or q10. They are clones of a Mac app and are simple full screen black background text editors, so there are no obvious menus and nothing to get you off the track of pumping out verbiage. Everything is filed as a simple text document. This is minimalism at it's finest. There are shortcut keys - cntrl-s for save, cntrl-q for quit. Both offer a limited amount of customization. q10 has a spell check- it also appears a little faster.

I picked up a great way to use this at LifeHacker using an auto hotkey to quickly cut and paste things I find in cyber-space (like job search stuff) for later review. Of course you could just use the default text editor as well. The important thing is to be creative. Now stop staring at your computer screen and write!