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30. November 2009 – 11:04 by Bengt Feil
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Over the course of the last few weeks there was a lot of noise about Google Wave and its potential to transform everything from newspapers to novel writing. The Wave approach, which consists of both a tool and a underlying protocol, has be discussed as being the solution that will unite online communication and therefore revolutionize the web at the same time as it has been described as being complicated and not very useful.
I wrote an overview about the tool and the Wave protocol earlier on this blog and promised to take a look at its possible implications for eParticipation. Luckily Tim Bonnemann started a discussion on how to use Google Wave for eParticipation using the tool itself as soon at it was available. If you have a Wave account you can be view it here. In this article I will try to give the major points which have been made in that discussion. All the ideas presented in this text have been developed collaboratively by the 59 people have signed into this Wave until now. Thanks to all the contributors and especially Tim for starting the Wave!
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Posted in Trends, Visions | 1 Comment »
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23. July 2009 – 11:14 by Bengt Feil
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In May 2009 Google presented the Wave project to the public simply calling it “a personal communication and collaboration tool” at the Google I/O conference. The presentation of the project was 80 minutes long which hints at the fact that Google Wave may be more complex than what it is referred to in the short explanation. Given Googles announcement that Wave will be opened up to a public beta in September and the major buzz this project gets on the internet I will try to sum up what it is about and what the implications may be. If you want to get an in depth overview of Wave please watch the Google I/O presentation embedded below.
https://www.youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ
Google Wave will try to combine all the online communication we know and use into one interface and to organize communication threads by context and topic as opposed to communication tool. The different tools for this new approach to online communication will be familiar (e.g. email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management) but the way the communication threads are organized are different. All communication activities related to one topic is called a Wave. As part of this Wave there can be endless amounts of communication activities (called Wavelets) using different tools with different groups of persons. Wavelets can be real time (e.g. instant messenger), asynchronous (e.g. email) or collaborative (e.g. wiki, shared document) and can include all kinds of media, links and even widgets (like small games etc.). The interesting innovation is that the Google Wave is able to recognize that all of these communication activities belong to a certain Wave which helps to overcome the fragmentation of online communication. Mashable.com made a great graphic to illustrate these concepts.
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Posted in Tools, Trends, Visions | No Comments »
