It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.

Google Wave may seem familiar to older users of the Internet, who have been using the parts that make up the whole of the platform for years. Wave, however, brings those pieces together cohesively to allow users to share photos, embed videos, and converge other Google applications such as Google Maps and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content on the fly. Here are four ways that newsrooms are using Wave.

Using Waves to Foster Engagement

Using Google Wave allows newsrooms to reach out to their audiences and invite their active participation on news stories. In the process, waves become a vehicle to create an engaged local community who can also play a role in the newsroom. That may redefine how news is gathered, reported and presented to its audience, blurring the boundary between newsroom and community bulletin board.

Chicago Tribune’s RedEye blog started its first public wave on November 10, and since then it has attracted more than 300 blips. Following that success, Stephanie Yiu, RedEye’s web editor, and Scott Kleinberg, senior editor of digital and print, now lead a half-hour public wave session every day.

“It’s a lot more live than Twitter because it’s like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other,” she told me. “It’s really about connecting with our readers on a new platform. We’re learning with our readers and moving forward together.”

RedEye sends out tweets promoting each wave with a link asking Twitter followers (those that have access to Google Wave) to join the conversation. Yiu told me the daily wave is a discussion about RedEye’s cover story. During the last 10 minutes they ask participants for suggestions on how to make the wave better.

What makes Google Wave so useful is the community building aspect, according to Yiu. “The great thing is once it ends at 11 o’clock, it keeps on going. They keep on talking,” she said. Yiu is hoping it will be a cool way to get feedback, such as movie reviews, from their readers that that they can also run in the RedEye print product, which is something they’re already doing with Twitter.

Using Waves As ‘Town Squares’

Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, has started two public waves so far. “People are enthusiastic and they want to talk about news. I was surprised how much discussion there was about the news,” he said.

However, said Quigley, the challenge right now is keeping public waves on topic. If they get more than 50 blips discussion grinds to a halt, reported Quigley. He added that in order for Google Wave to work during a news event, there needs to be the ability to moderate and or easily spin something into another wave and link to it in the first wave to keep it on topic. He stressed Google Wave is in its early stages and in preview, but there’s definitely potential with it, so these are issues that could be addressed in the future.

“We’ve been looking for years for collaboration with the public in a meaningful way and this could be the tool,” he said.

Quigley is eager to keep pushing the envelope with Google Wave to see what it possible. He told me, for example, that he wants to try a participant’s suggestion to embed a Google Calendar with links to waves listed within it so users can follow that calendar with the wave schedule. He also hopes to try the map gadget the next time Austin gets hit with an ice storm. He said he would embed a map into a Google Wave and then people could report conditions at their house. Users could edit the map as weather conditions change.

Google Wave has the potential to become a virtual “town square,” where otherwise separate gadgets applied to content created by journalists and enhanced by the wave’s users can be used to provide an accurate, detailed description of what’s happening locally.

Wave as a Newsroom Content Planning Tool

Chris Taylor, online editor at TBO.com, is also the online breaking news editor in charge of planning content for his converged newsroom (which includes the Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and TBO.com). Each night he emails a content budget to the deadline team, but he is now also using a daily wave that others in the newsroom can add to, edit, etc. Taylor said there are about 15 people on this wave and he has requested more invites from Google to get more people involved.

The daily wave accounts for all the content the newsroom knows is coming or is chasing down. There are about 40 stories in a wave and each story gets a paragraph and after each story is a blip. “Anything we can do in a newsroom of this size [to help] the content we produce to keep from falling through the cracks is a plus,” Taylor said.

When Taylor comes into work in the morning he can immediately get caught up on the status of all items in the newsroom budget by checking the wave. He said reviewing the wave at his desk takes one-tenth the time of having meetings.

“I think using it for this will get people comfortable with wave, which is my ultimate goal,” he said. “As we get more comfortable with it, we’ll be able to be where our audience is.”

Turning Blog Posts Into Public Waves

Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms at the Los Angeles Times, collaborated with social media reporter Mark Milian on the blog post “How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism” that ran on the newspaper’s web site a couple of months ago.

Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process. Nystrom said in an email interview they’re looking at all the potential uses that Milian posited in the blog post. In a case of “eating his own dogfood,” so to speak, Milian even embedded the post as a wave and it has since received more than 350 blips.

“That experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it’s a valuable tool for small-te
am collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least,” Nystrom said by email. “People quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.”

He added that they’ll definitely do more of this and that it’s just a matter of identifying which topics would benefit from collaboration.

“Ideally, every post would plug into wave because I love the inline commenting system. But I don’t want to flood the ocean,” according to Milian. “When we do another piece on Google Wave, or on something that begs for crowdsourcing, you will definitely see it in Wave.”

Google stole the tech and media spotlight today as it revealed a mountain of new details about Chrome OS, the company’s new operating system due in late 2010. It is a completely different type of OS (we provide a summary of how) that eliminates the desktop and focuses on getting you on the web quickly and efficiently.

Now that we’ve had some time to digest Chrome OS and get information on all some of the details, it’s time to ask the big questions in order to understand if or how Chrome OS could change the world. What is Google’s eventual goal with Chrome OS? How will it affect Microsoft? And finally, what impact will Chrome OS have?

To explore those questions, it’s time to revisit the Google Revenue Equation.

The Google Revenue Equation Revisited

Several months ago, I revealed what I believed to be the Google Revenue Equation. My argument at the time was that Google Chrome OS should not be viewed as a direct competitor to Microsoft Windows, but as Google’s biggest attempt yet to push the world onto the web more and for longer.

The reason Google is pushing for society to use the desktop less and utilize the web more, I argued, was because of the Google Revenue Equation: Revenue = Amount of Time on the Web. After today’s announcements, I still believe that my equation is correct and that I hit the nail on the head with Google’s motivations.

As Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted to me in a reply today, Google wants the web to succeed and will do what it takes to make even more functional, useful, valuable, and enticing to everyone (consider this the Cutts Corollary to the Google Revenue Equation). Chrome OS is the company’s biggest step yet towards fulfilling those goals.

Google’s Key Goals with Chrome OS

With the Google Revenue Equation in mind, it’s easier to understand Google’s primary motivations for creating an OS based entirely off the browser. The more time we spend browsing the web, the more money Google makes. It’s that simple. Thus, Google’s primary goal is to get us on the web more.

That’s exactly what Chrome OS does: its interface is 100% web, thus you are always browsing if you’re using Chrome OS. Every app is a web app. Plus, Chrome OS loads in seconds, getting you on the web faster.

In order for Google to accomplish its goal of getting us on the web more, it has to eliminate time sinks and anything that distracts someone from surfing the web on the computer. Thus, one of Google’s goals is to destroy the desktop.

There is no desktop on Google’s new operating system, but that’s only the beginning. Google may only be looking to launch on netbooks next year, but make no mistake: it hopes to have a strong presence laptops and desktops everywhere within the next five to seven years. Not only that, but it hopes that the influence of Chrome OS is powerful enough to push all future operating systems to be more web-centric.

Microsoft Stands in the Way

The biggest obstacle standing in its way towards a web-centric computing experience is none other than Microsoft. The two have been locked in battle for years, but Google is now stepping onto turf that the technology behemoth has dominated for decades.

Here’s the thing: Microsoft is well aware of the Google Revenue Equation. It also knows that Chrome OS and its price point (free) aren’t in its best interests. Thus, Microsoft won’t play to Google’s game, leaving Google with only option: to destroy or fundamentally alter Windows. This is equivalent to gutting Microsoft and leaving it to wither away into oblivion.

Google is setting the stage for its biggest battle with Microsoft yet. The result of its Chrome OS bet will directly affect the fate of computing, the operating system, and the web.

What Impact Will Chrome Have?

Google’s intent is nothing short of a paradigm shift, one where the web is synonymous with the computer. It’s a process that will take years – decades in fact – but Google is patient and will wait for the Internet to become more accessible (and for Wi-Fi to be accessible in almost any location). The Chrome browser was a big push for a web-centric world, but Chrome OS is far more ambitious.

Google cares more about the browser becoming the OS than it cares about Chrome OS being the OS of choice on the computers of the world. When companies and people adopt its standards, Google wins. It’s the same philosophy behind Google Wave: provide a free, open-source software and focus on changing how we think of communication. In the case of Chrome OS, the focus is on changing what we expect when we turn on a computer.

It’s tough to tell if Google will succeed in its ambitious plan. However, it has a track record that cannot be ignored and, in our estimation, Google has already been instrumental towards society’s embrace of the web. Prepare yourself for the next era of the web, sparked by the fundamental philsophies behind Google Chrome OS.