The event was held at the IT University, which is a really fancy new building. Check out some of the pictures from the site. Thanks Jacques Holst for getting the room.
There was around 25 persons with different experiences with Google Wave. 5 had not used Wave, and only 2 had developed applications on Wave. Guess that includes yours truly. So there are not a lot of developers on Wave arround. What a shame, but makes the area much better for us.
I had an idea of people had knowledge of Google Wave, but since that was not the case I had to make a 15 minutes introduction to Wave. I should probably create a few slides shows for the 5 and 15 minute introduction of Wave, which can be used in such instances. I think the introduction was ok, though it would have helped if I had presentations for the amount of time.
Jacques gave a great presentation on how his class made notes in Wave. The whole class was on Wave and they could easily take notes together. It was to early to guess if the use of Wave for studes was giving better learning. Jacques said he feldt he learned more using Wave to take notes in collaboration with the others. They also uploaded the slides and commented on them in Wave.
I pitched Google Technology User Group Gtug.dk and hope we can gather enough people to start a chapter in Copenhagen. Please join on gtug.dk and we will see if we can start something.
Lastly we talked about if we should have more meetings. We agreed on having a next meeting sometime in January 2010. There will be focus on some development perspective, and it will be interesting to see what we can create.
If you where at the event, please comment on how you feel we can make next event better. Either hire as comments or in the Wave we created. Was the meetup.com site any useful or can we just organize the whole thing in Wave.
Gina Trapani the author of CompleteWaveGuide gave a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo NY 09 on just 15 minutes. So it is possible to make sort presentations of what wave is.
There was accilty a lot of really interesting points, which it was worth taking into accounts. The thing I noticed was:
You cannot explain Wave in one sentence. That is probably one of the problems when you meet somebody at a reception, how do you explain what wave is. My reply is often a combination of Email, IM, Wikis(which most don’t know) and documents in a online workspace.
We are all power users in Wave and are able to do everything we want. We just need to learn how.
Also you cannot expect to fully use Wave in just an afternoon. It takes along time to get use to. I think, I know about how to use Wave, but you are always impressed by the content and usages.
Gina guesses that we will not check our wave inbox as often as we do with our mail. That will be a relief not to constantly feel bad for not checking your mail.
When they worked on the Complete Wave Guide, the team did not write the book in Wave but used Wave to have all the business discussions in. They said Wave was not stable enough to they had confidence that it would last.
One of my favorite blogs on Google Wave (The Shiny Wave) have picked up a Wave with Etiquette on Google Waves. The interesting aspect is that when you are working with somebody else you can get a lot of noise or disturbance. Many times when you are collaborating with a lot of other people you are missing the rules for the conversation. This etiquette is a way to make some of the rules more global.
With no Access Control Layers (ACL) or rules it is not possible to ban people from editing any part of the Wave. That mean if you have public waves or to a group waves you need to hope your users does not make any changes. So Google Wave is build on trust and you need to trust the people in order to make posts go nuts.
There is a good judgment of people not to mess up any documents. An example is the The Declaration of Independence, where it would look really strange if anyone changed on the wave. It seems like nobody are vandalizing the document. On a side note the document and users seems to originate from thirteencolonies.net, which must be a hosted domain. So you can share from hosted domains to Wave. Can anyone edit in the Wave hire?
The blog on the Shiny Wave mentions a Wave By Elliot Cable, which talks about the different types of moderation. All waves should med have on of the following tags. I would suggest you to go to the wave to get the full idea of each type.
tag:moderated: is the mildest form of moderation and therefore give most discussions.
tag:edit-moderated: is where only the initial blip should not be changed but the rest are more relaxed.
tag:reply-moderated: is where the participants should collaborate in a separate Wave, the Wave owner will then transfer the content to the Wave.
tag:locked: is when you don’t anybody to edit in your Wave, so why use Wave?
One problem is that you have to understand the difference between those four levels of interaction. If you have not written the rules or been a part in the generation, you will not know how to see the difference and what you are allowed to to on the current Wave. This could stop people from taking a part in the discussion.
Most if not all of the rules described hire should be possible to implement programmatic. It would make it much easier for users to implement the changes suggested. Then it is just to make the changes a part of the ACL for the Wave protocol, which obvious also needs to support the changes.
I have updated the WordPress robot (WP-BOT@appspot.com) to publish to your own blog. This feature has been requested by many users, so I thought it was time to give it a try. The usage of the robot is fairly simple. The original version of the robot was described in this post, where I just proved the concept was possible.
Simply add the robot to a Wave. You don’t have any credentials connected with your Wave your you will get a link, where you can enter information about your WordPress. Next time you add the robot to a wave, the new Wave will be published to a new Wave.
To use the plugin simply add Wavr to your blog and in Setting -> Writing Settings make sure XML-RPC is activate.
The usage is also showed on this video.
Do you have any suggestion on how I can make the service even better?
In an experiment described on WaveOnBusiness, which deals with Wave in a publishing company. The idea of using Wave for publishers has apparently stretched even further. Why not use Google Wave as a news platform. It would be strange to use the term newspaper or newsletter, but newswave would be more appropriate term. Lets see if the term catches on.
Bjarne P Tveskov has started the first internet magazine, I have seen, called Bølgendk. The magazine is only in Danish, and you can find it hire. It is a summary of some news created for the last week and should be published weekly. The idea could also be relevant for any other niche marked you want to write about. It could be something in your local community or about your business passion.
Newswave could be used as a way to create/deliver local news for a small area. It would require some editors how could create and edit the initial comment, so you were sure to cover the most elementary. Then other users could create the missing pieces, so i could write about the project we are doing in the community or the result of the local football match.
The concept of having a place where all readers can comment on news is just interesting. Users can contribute to your news feeds to the ideas and get more feedback. Dependant of you readers/contributors you will be able to create a comprehensive newswave .
One of the important concepts with a paper is to get readers, because then you can also sell ads. It is the same for web sites, the more readers you have the more you can make.
At the moment there is not a lot of users on wave, but the users are quite passionate about Wave and try to use it for different things. At the moment of writing there are 50 users on the current edition, which is probably not enough to have much revenue. If you get more involved it could probably be possible to support the Wave with ads.
When the next edition is created you also want to have the same 50 subscribers. So there should be developed a way to make sure all subscribers get the new newswave. This could probably be done using a robot.
Business could form for editing the waves and organize the way users can contribute to the news stories. So we can contenue to have local news and create application to support the way users are creating the content.
I’m looking forward to see if newswave will take off, and be the place to go for news on current events.
