One of the interesting features in NetNewsWire, the OS X RSS reader I use, is the ability to highlight edits and other changes made to weblog entries after their initial publication. The grammar/style geek in me enjoys watching writers refine their style, catch and fix typos, and generally tweak things.

In the old publishing model, text was more or less fixed once it was published. And I'm sure there are some people who lament the "sloppiness" of online texts that isn't perfect the minute it hits the user's screen the first time. But the tradeoffs between finished text and publishing deadlines, especially for news stories or casual posts to a weblog, are complicated—enough so that it's frequently worth it to post something now with minor (especially surface-level) problems than to have to add in the time for an additional round of copy editing. For everything published.

Take the NNW screenshot above, showing a c|net report on the Yahoo/Microsoft merger. The red highlighted text was deleted and the green added after the initial publication of the story. Some of the edits are completely stylistic: "is not expected," for example, has been replaced with "have left the decision of who" as the story unfolded. This seems like a useful edit. Similarly with the replacement of "converge on" by "negotiate" (although neither version is "more" correct, the latter seems less charged). Were those changes that the writer should have caught the first time around? Possibly. But the story was useful in the initial form but improved in the revision. So the live editing seems like a good compromise. (I'm not sure about the change in the source being cited, from "CNBC report" to "Wall Street Journal," but it's not clear why that change was made—could be an error in the original report or it could be that the WSJ source appeared later.)

In a perfect world, all published text would be utterly polished, tweeked, and always up to date. If by "perfect" you mean extraordinarily dull.