Loosing Site

I’ve been using Wave for the past week, on an experimental basis and to work on a couple of projects with clients.  I’ve noticed that a lot of posts and articles have been focusing on the similarities to chat, email and micro-blogging without really looking at the full range of features, or their application to specific tasks and contexts.  So here I’ve drawn together some videos that show a range of uses.

Overview | Neater Messaging

This is a great hand-animated view showing some of Waves features. It focusses on the centralization of the conversation, which makes wave cleaner to use than a stack of emails.

Internal Workflow | SAP Gravity

This demonstrates the use of gadgets in a business context. Notice in particular how the centrally hosted gadget:

• preserves a state history so that the different stages in construction of the model can be replayed along with the main conversation
• communicates with the back-end system as part of an extended workflow

Customer Relations | Sales Force

Here a “robot” is used to intelligently deal with the early stages of a customer support query, including eventually passing the customer on to a human support agent. Again, the wave is smoothly integrated with a backend system.

Education | Wave Alpha

Here the Wave Alpha robot uses responds to questions ranging from basic arithmetic, through calculus and meteorology to the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

Tags: Google, Wave, communication, integration, business, sales, education

The following is a comment I left in a SideWiki on Phil Windley’s Technometrica article “Claiming My Right to a Purpose-Centric Web: SideWiki“.  I’m repeating it here as I’m basically quite proud of it. 

I’m intrigued by the question of ownership of engagement and discussion. I’m seeing a lot of successful bloggers expressing a lot of outrage, and yet normally receiving comments is something that bloggers love, excepting spam, unless it’s really good spam.

As I’m typing this I don’t see what I’m doing as a defacement. My comments are clearly divided from your site. They are in a separate part of my user interface that I have chosen to switch on. When I publish they will appear:

- on one of my blogs
- on my Google Profile
- in my FriendFeed stream
- in my Twitter Stream

These are locations where I like the text that I’ve written to appear.

My choice.
My control.
My browser.

Sidewiki is not the first 3rd party technology to enable the annotation of site, and it won’t be the last. It has a high profile and a high distribution because it’s embedded in the Google Toolbar. It’s not unique, but it is a nice implementation that complements traditional threaded comments. You’ll note that this comment is about a highlighted phrase. That’s a very useful feature for those of us who like to fact check, or to limit our expressed opinions to the narrow scope that we’re comfortable with.

I’d really urge your readers to try before condemning.

Tags: Sidewiki, ownership, conversation

Aviary have done it again, this time with an online audio editor that comes with a collection of loops and effects for you to incorporate in your own works.

You can even record directly into the web application.

This is a demonstration of some of the key features of Sidewiki, Google’s system for leaving public comments on any web page. I’m paying particular attention to how your Sidewiki comments can be brought into other systems. Your comments automatically appear in your Google profile. You can also automatically post to Blogger if you choose. I also demonstrate entering a Webmaster’s comment, which is given a highlighted prime position at the top of the comments list.

Background

Background information on the development and philosophy of Sidewiki is available on Google’s announcement post:

Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

Transcript

With Google Sidewiki you can add public notes to web pages. Sidewiki is part of the Google Toolbar and can be enabled and disabled as needed.

You can vote up helpful notes.

You can find out more about a note’s author by clicking through to their profile.

In my profile you can see the notes I’ve made so far and get an RSS feed of the notes.

Here I’ve got the feed appearing in my blog.

If you follow a link in the feed you get back to the original page where the comment was made.

Here’s where I commented on a BuzzMachine article.

And you can choose to see everyone’s comments – not just mine.

I really like the way the page scrolls to show which text comments refer to.

Comments can be made about snippets of text as well as the article as a whole.

Here I’m leaving a comment about Rapla. An open source booking system that worked well for me.

As soon as I highlight some text an edit button appears in the sidebar.

Bear with me here while I find some text to paste.

And lets give it a nice title.

How about “Implementation at Oxford Medical Sciences Teaching Centre”.

At the bottom of the post you can set up links to your blogger account, and choose whether or not to post automatically. I’ve set up a demo blog so you can see this in action.

Once a comment is saved it can be sent to your social networks. I’m tweeting this one.

You get a pop-up twitter window, and the system generates a draft message for you.

Here it is on my Twitter profile.

If you’re the webmaster of a site you can leave a special comment that will always appear at the top of a page.

I’m setting this up for the home page of my Loosing Site blog. I’m already registered as the webmaster so I’m given an extra checkbox to write as the site’s owner.

My comment is then highlighted green and pushed to the top of the list.

Video introduction to openinternet.gov an FCC site that promotes net neutrality and seeks consultation on how this can be achieved.