Writely

Google's web-based text editor, Writely , seems pretty decent, at first glance. It has all the basic things you would want with a good text editor - bullets, numbered lists, cut and paste, and hyperlinks. Spell check is nice, taking ideas from Word and underlining "misspelled" words (though I'm curious why "Writely" and "blgo" aren't pre-loaded into the dictionary). Ctrl-functions (cut, copy, paste) work well, though I would like to be able to drag highlighted text. Saving as PDF is especially nice.

One thing I really like is the way Writely merges typical word processing with web publishing. Posting documents to a blog is fairly easy, and I hope Google finds a way to reuse their Writely functionality with other text-entry applications, like Gmail and Blogspot. Users can modify the HTML code backing their page, and the hyperlink feature is pretty nice too - rather than simply entering a URL, it provides options for displaying text & flyover text, email links, and other documents.

Overall, I think this is a strong application, and may become a good blog editor for those blogs that have several people working on them. It won't replace Word (though you can save Writely documents into Word), but it's a good tool nonetheless.

ps - titles don't carry over for blog posts...