I like this bit: "It also looks at articles that contain flags like (sp?), which is the author telling us that he or she failed high school English."
The poor spelling found on the Internet creates a positive feedback loop that makes it increasingly difficult to spell words properly.
Before wide acceptance of the Web, most written words appeared in magazines, books, newspapers, and other sources which were, hopefully, reviewed by professionals with more knowledge of spelling than the average person. If you were unsure of a spelling you could write out the word and easily recognize if the word matched the ordering of letters that you had seen so many times before.
Now, for some words, you've probably seen the improper spelling more often than the correct spelling. That makes it more difficult to recall or recognize the proper spelling. For children subjected to this misspelling onslaught at an early age, it must be worse. I suppose many of these spelling problems would not even exist if English were a more intuitive written language. However, I expect this all to go away as grammar checkers are embedded into web browsers.
"In a typical company a small but significant number of employees read blogs and comment threads every day, sometimes several times in a work day. I say a significant number because the people who read comment threads and post comments of their own are very often among the most highly-paid people in the organization. The time apostrophree saves goes right to the bottom line.
Most people either don’t recognize or don’t care when they encounter a misspelled word or incorrectly-formed plural. But some people do notice, and there’s a personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their superior English skills online."
---
So the target customer is someone who wants to not be so hung up about spelling mistakes and grammar, and wants to save time? This just seems a ridiculous answer to me.
I can see it being very useful, and a great feature in something else...
Me too. Well done, and not a bad idea. The spelling Nazi in me was already rejoicing.
Loved this line: "We observed that non-technical staff with Internet access are more likely to use their computers to view and collect pornography than to post spelling corrections."
The "clue gate" in the last paragraph is the final giveaway.
My first reaction was "how the f--- did they raise 25 million dollars ?", after reading I see their use but still, why 25 million dollars? Do they need that kind of money to expand?
How many are they? Do founders ever get a large sum of such money as their own money or is it always purely investment money?
I guess YCombinator make money when their companies receive funding?
Is the name 'apostrophree' a typo itself? There are no hits on Google besides this article.
It seems way more efficient to have something like this running server side by whoever is hosting the content. This is something like charging for a spelling/grammar checker to read documents. As long as the publisher had a good editor I shouldn't have to pay for one.
If only something like this was real... or there was some other way of correcting the general butchering of the English language that occurs.
Maybe there should be some sort of law that requires everyone where some sort of modified electric dog collar so that every time someone types in "lol, wut r u sayin" - they get 10,000 volts.
This kind of technology should probably also apply to trolls, spammers and politicians.
The poor spelling found on the Internet creates a positive feedback loop that makes it increasingly difficult to spell words properly.
Before wide acceptance of the Web, most written words appeared in magazines, books, newspapers, and other sources which were, hopefully, reviewed by professionals with more knowledge of spelling than the average person. If you were unsure of a spelling you could write out the word and easily recognize if the word matched the ordering of letters that you had seen so many times before.
Now, for some words, you've probably seen the improper spelling more often than the correct spelling. That makes it more difficult to recall or recognize the proper spelling. For children subjected to this misspelling onslaught at an early age, it must be worse. I suppose many of these spelling problems would not even exist if English were a more intuitive written language. However, I expect this all to go away as grammar checkers are embedded into web browsers.