When will I have time to Wave?

Google Wave, that is. This semester has gone by too fast, but I now have an address on Google's still-in-beta "by invitation" collaborative/conversation system. I'm giving it a quick look, so that I can at least wave it at my students before the semester ends.

I was surprised to see how many public Wave discussions related to newspapers I found, once I'd figured out how to search for such things. See this L.A. Times article, How Google Wave could transform journalism, and other links below.

Wave is part e-mail, Wiki, chat, file-sharing and bulletin board. Once you're in, you can search for public Waves (ripples? currents? tides?) such as the daily ones the Chicago RedEye is running. I joined a Wave discussion of ideas for college media projects, which I'll share with Radford students as I get them invited. It already had a few dozen contributors.

Just after my invitation arrived (thanks to Mich Sineath at AEJMC), I stumbled on this article, which suggests that not having a ready-built community to wave with is a common complaint: What Users Like/Dislike About Google Wave along with this, Why Google Wave sucks, and why you will use it anyway

However, there are already 30 people in my GMail "contact" list with Wave accounts. On the other hand, I could say "only 30," since my contact list has more than 1,000 e-mail addresses. I wonder how many of them are in the same boat I'm in: "Intriguing new tool, but no time to use it right now."

My Wave account gives me eight invitations to send, and I'll divide them evenly between students and faculty. I'll seed some invites in my Web production classes next week and next semester, chain-letter style (invite one student, who can invite another, etc.), and do the same with our school website committee, then see if we can use it for a virtual meetings. I'm also intrigued by a plug-in called Bloggy that lets you post a conversation from Wave to a blog like this one... but I'll save that for later.

"Bloggy"? I see there are also "Embeddy," "Tweety" and "Trendy."

I wonder if someone has created a "Cutesy," but that might be redundant.

Here's the first batch of Wave links from my bookmark list:

• How Google Wave is Changing the News
• Chicago RedEye does daily waves
• LA Times: How Google Wave could transform journalism
  
• Google Wave... journalistic tool?
• 9 Ways to Use Google Wave (in education)
• NYTimes Bits Blog tags for Google Wave
• Top 6 Game-Changing Features, Complete Guide and More (Mashable)
• Wave gadgets tutorial
• Tutorial (10 videos) at Butterscotch.com
• Google's Long Video (80 minutes?!) about Wave
  
• Google's shorter video on ways to use Wave
  

Searching & graphing public data using Google

A new data-visualization feature was added to Google search a couple of months ago, while I wasn't paying attention to anything but end-of-semester work. The system uses the latest official statistics available from government agencies, and Google is soliciting more data.

Luckily my Twitter feed brought a couple of tips about it today. Very cool. Try typing "unemployment rate" or "population" in a Google search window, followed by the name of your city or county. This would be very useful for journalism students, once it works as advertised. (See note below.)


Related posts:

• Official Google Blog: Adding search power to public data
• Google+Data.gov+Gapminder

Problem:The click-through enlarged graphs shown in the video work for "population radford va" but when I search for "unemployment rate radford va" the enlarged graph page comes up blank. The same happens with the two searches demonstrated by Google. I posted a note in a Google forum asking whether the unemployment data search is broken... and will update this when I get more info. (Or just follow that link to the forum to see if there's any discussion.)

On the population data search, a left column allows you to add other counties or states to the expanded graph, as shown in the video. Using the same technique with unemployment data would be even more interesting, so I hope they get it working.

Footnote: The search should be "population placename, st" or "unemployment data placename, st" -- if you leave out the word "data" in the unemployment search, or include it in the population search, you don't get the data graph. The comma appears to be optional. Also, in some localities, such as Radford, independent city names work with or without the word "city." County searches also work with or without the word "county." (New York City, however, is not the same kind of thing. Apparently "New York County" is only part one of five in the city -- 1.6 million of its 8.2 million people. See U.S. Census QuickFacts. )

Drive-by shooting at edge of campus

Radford University has been the victim of a drive-by -- of a non-violent kind -- by whoever shoots street-level photos for Google Maps.

The pictures are a shot of reality when compared with Google's local map, which leads visitors into a couple of dead-ends. If you browse around the university with maps.google.com, you get a map that ignores several years of campus construction and omits the campus entrance at Jefferson and Fairfax streets.

Ask for the School of Communication offices at 702-704 Fairfax St., and instead of a straight route down Jefferson, you get wild goose chase directions down the wrong ends of former cross-streets Adams or Fairfax, which have been campus cul de sacs since before I got here.

With the addition of street-level photos, Google's Rt. 177 (Tyler Avenue) map shows an Oscar-like golden figure you drag to the roadway for a street-view color photo. The photo above clearly shows the campus gates where Tyler meets Jefferson -- an intersection the map version underneath insists does not exist, the gray swath in front of the forlorn golden guy.

In another Radford reality check, at the foot of Tyler Avenue you can enlarge the T-intersection's photo just enough to see a street sign saying "East Main" while the map insists you are turning onto "Norwood Street." (Maybe that was its name once?)

I hadn't noticed the local street-level pictures until a student pointed them out in class last week. I'm not sure how long they have been online, but I estimate they were taken last summer, since they still show the much-missed Joe's Diner, whose site has been a vacant lot for six months.

Google's photos show only Tyler and part of East Main; the drive-by shooters apparently crossed the New River and never came back, but you can trail them into Pulaski. The City of Radford, meanwhile, has an online Geographic Information System that provides up-to-date maps. No street-level pictures, but it has more detailed aerial photos than Google. See City of Radford GIS or www.radford.va.us/BasicGIS/

Footnote: Yes, I'll mention my headline when we have class discussions of yellow journalism.

Historic magazine archive via Google

Just when my Media History students might need one more source for their final semester projects...

Wonder what the latest technology was in 1905? Go read Popular Mechanics for that year, back when "wireless telegraphy" was the hottest thing since the "horseless carriage." (I guess "...less" was "more" back then.)

This blast-from-the-past search is thanks to a new archive of old magazine articles at http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

(For more about Google linking to historic newspaper archives, see my blog item from a few months ago.)

For background see this BusinessWeek article: Google updates search index with old magazines:

"Google has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine. As part of its quest to corral more content published on paper, Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 1 million articles from magazines that hit the newsstands decades ago."

(Many thanks to Gerald Grow, a magazine-publishing expert and one of the most "sharing" professors on the Web, for an e-mail alert about this new Google search development.)

I haven't explored enough to see what publications are included... but Popular Mechanics and Popular Science are part of the collection, which will be useful for the "Media History" course when we talk about communication technology...

And I noticed New York magazine turning up in a quick search, which will be a resource for research into more recent journalism history -- and for news writing courses. Originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, New York published a lot of great "new journalism" in the 1970s, including Tom Wolfe's article "The Birth of 'The New Journalism,'" which I was just talking about in class today, and one of my all-time favorite cover stories on investigative reporters. Amazing.

Here's a surprise: I did a quick search for the words "journalism" and "politics." The top two hits were not the first magazines I expected to see. They were Jet and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is archived back to 1945. Jet -- a great resource for studying African-American culture, apparently had regular columns headed "politics" and "journalism." (Ebony and Black World are also part of the collection.) As for the Bulletin, I guess the topics just came up regularly. This quote jumped out at me from a 1985 article, titled "The Media: Playing the Government's Game":

Before the atomic bomb, journalism never hesitated to march off to war, but the news media usually were eager to demobilize once victory seemed at hand ...

I haven't stumbled on a list of which magazines are in the collection, but I've noticed quite an assortment: Ebony, Mother Jones, Black Belt, Cincinnati Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Log Home Living, Bicycling, Backpacker, Vegetarian Times, Prevention, Runner's World, Baseball Digest, CIO... The themes suggest that publishers like Johnson, Emmis and Rodale have contributed groups of titles.

Finally, although you can search for any words in any magazine, the results delivered are full-page images. That means you get to see full-spread advertising layouts, which will be appreciated by students and professors interested in advertising and design.