I was wondering what Wave might be good for, then it struck me. It might be a window into the process of composition.
I recently wrote a post about writing, which ended up with a clever little turn as I tied everything back to the theme of the chicken and the the egg. It became the Chicken’s Guide to Writing a Better Blog Post.
Like many posts I am remain proud of, it was internally consistent and coherent, but not because it started that way. What you saw was still the finished product, and it is hard to separate the original sparks from the final polish when all you see is a post that is temporally “flat.”
What we need, if we truly want to get into the writing process, is a means of seeing the revisions as they happen. While WordPress does support multiple revisions of documents, there is no easy way to publish them all simultaneously.
Then I thought it might be instructive to do a Wiki, as you can spend all the time you want comparing revisions and seeing how the post evolves. But that would be a pain for the reader, and it would not be as evident what was changing, and why.
So in the hopes there would be a way to not bore the reader, I think I will embark on a little experiment. I think I will start writing posts (about writing) in Google Wave, and use it to track the changes in the document. Then, I ought to be able to showcase the changes, as I move bits and pieces of text around to suit my needs. I can start with the outline of the piece (where one exists, and in the case of this one, you really are getting stream of consciousness here), and fill in the bullets before filling them out.
Still might be a couple of other hurdles to cross, such as how to display it. Right now, I am hoping there is a way to export a Wave in motion – and if there isn’t, I can always play it back as a Jing screencast. Then embed it with the finished post.
Who knows, maybe *I* will learn something about how I write, once I see the playbacks.
I think Etherpad/typewith.me would be a much better tool for this. Try it here: http://typewith.me
Before Google Wave there was a startup called Etherpad. They were funded by a guy named Paul Graham through a program called Ycombinator. Paul Graham is famous for his essays. One day while using Etherpad to write one of his essays he thought it would be cool if Etherpad would keep a history of all of his revisions so he could play it back like a movie, so the Etherpad team implemented this feature.
Recently, Etherpad was purchased by Google and they joined the Wave team. Google shutdown Etherpad but it was so popular and the backlash so severe they decided to open source the Etherpad code. Several sites now run this software, one of them is typewith.me
Here’s an example, just press play:
http://typewith.me/ep/pad/view/8xaezMmCJn/latest
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for me writting is like forging metal into a sword, you heat, you blow, you heat, you beat over and over, as long as it takes, until you have a worthy sword ready to slice air, flesh or truth
and by the way the smithy is a dirty place, blacksmiths only ~