Etherpad, as you know, is an online word processor where multiple people can edit the same document at the same time and changes appear on everyone’s screen in almost real time.

This feature, called collaborative editing, is now present in almost every other tool including Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office 2010 but let me highlight a slightly more interesting feature of Etherpad that’s unique to the service – you can use the tool to visualize your writing style.

Start a new (blank) document inside Etherpad and then compose an email message, a Word document, an article for your blog or even a chapter of your next book in the available writing space.

All your editing related actions are automatically captured in Etherpad and you can hit the Time Slider to replay the entire writing session. Here’s a demo:

Play ;