Victoria J.K. Lamburn found an interesting application called LaTeX Lab - an online LaTeX editor. It's cool that people are still working with LaTeX, even though I can't stand the idea of writing raw LaTeX by hand. (If the people who hate writing markup by hand saw writing LaTeX by hand, they'd be stunned, I think).
I used to use LyX on my Mac for writing essays and also my monster, deadline-addled dissertation. Since reformatting my Mac, I haven't reinstalled it (it's a pain to install), but it's really a great system for academic writing - mostly because of BibTeX being one of the few bibliography systems that doesn't suck. It's complex, sure. I've written my own BibTeX style templates (I treasure tom.bst which contains all my personal bibliographic rules). It'd be nice if someone could create a LaTeX/BibTeX replacement that used XML, XSL or even XHTML with a smattering of microformats and Semantic Web data appraoches. The hCite efforts and the Bibliontology stuff seems to be going in that direction.
I look forward to basically a webby way of writing academic papers (even though I don't write academic papers anymore) - just as S5 has made a webby way of doing PowerPoint-style presentations using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. This is where "word processors" like Word and Google Docs go wrong. Just because you put words on paper, doesn't mean you are doing it for the same purpose. Writing a dissertation and writing a birthday card are different tasks and should have different tools.
I'm helping someone with an essay at the moment, and I've suggested to them that they use a version control system like Git to keep track of changes they make to their work. Now, if you were writing a short letter, a version control system would be unnecessary. But document-focused version control is something I think is quite important and, if I were to write something book-length like a novel or doctoral dissertation, I would use in a flash. Similarly, if I were writing something that length, I'd not use any kind of word processor like Word or Google Docs. Too much like toys. I'd use an XML editor, have a RELAX NG schema and adapt the schema to the document as I write it. Then I'd use CSS or XSL to turn it into the finished product. Overkill? No way. I prefer to call it "doing it properly" - I try to do security properly, and I would try to do academic writing properly.
