I’ve been playing with Google Wave for about three weeks now and see a lot of potential for newsrooms to extend their reach into social media. Google Wave is still in beta and not open to everyone, but I’m already starting to see some immediate applications once it is widely available.

I went ahead and started a wave titled: Enhancing the news with Google Wave. If you are on Google Wave, add me to your contacts (cmgrantham@googlewave.com) and join the conversation on ways waves can be used to enhance the news experience.

At first glance, here are a few ways I’m personally exploring use of waves for later application in the newsroom:

• Live streams: I’m exploring doing a weekly wave with a daily live stream I do weekdays from 6-7 am CT called the Morning Browser. This is a live stream of my morning browsing experience that is literally produced live with feedback from folks on Twitter and in chat. A weekly wave will allow viewers to share links, video and other content that can be explored during the live stream. Each weekly wave can then be used to drop links to posted clips from that week’s Morning Browser. Other live stream events could also have their own wave.
• Comments: posting a finished story for viewer feedback and conversation. These waves can then be embedded in the posted story on the news station’s website. Moderation can be an issue here.
• Story creation: collaborating with known experts on certain story ideas can help reporters follow leads, story angles or sources in developing a story. Links to supplemental research can also help. Still pondering whether this can work as a public wave or if it’s best as a private wave.
• Disasters / weather events: creating these as public waves can allow viewers to share important information as well as share content like photos and videos. embedded maps can help people understand challenges with these events as well.

If you have other ideas, please join the wave and share them. There are other local media on the wave how can also learn from your ideas. Feel free to add others to the wave.

Below is the wave. If you are logged into wave you should be able to see and interact with the wave.

Tags: collaboration, Google Wave, Social Media, WKRN

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Ideas, News, Social Media, Tech, WKRN, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.