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| This is a reprinting of the initial blip in this popular wave. Those already on Google Wave can find it here. Six things I like to do with Google \/\/ave1. Wave surfing: Do a search for with:public lang:en This will take a minute to load, and then all public waves (hopefully in English) will begin to scroll rapidly down the search pane. Pluck an interesting wave out of the stream and bingo! If you wanna keep the wave, don't forget to follow it or you may never find it again lol. Update: The way the public search is displayed has changed over the last couple of days. It still displays the list, but doesn't seem to update as often. More on this later. 2. Hometown search: Search for with:public tag:your hometown (Replace 'your hometown' with the name of your town). Since the results are displayed chronologically, you can keep up to date with what's happening locally. This is great for finding social media waves that are organising meet-ups. 3. Bloggers: Many people are blogging with Wave. Try a search for with:public tag:blog - you'd be surprised how many results are returned. You can also add the filter lang:en but I don't find it necessary, and anyway, I'm not sure it works very well. Another way to search blogs is to use with:public title:blog - the 'title' keyword finds waves with 'blog' in the title. 4. Notes, notes, notes! It's a great idea to take notes with Wave. Notes are waves where you are the only participant. Don't be afraid to hit 'New Wave' to make a note. It's quick and easy and you don't have to save your work. And if you happen to expand on your note, you may end up making a major wave out of it. (That's how this wave began...) To search your notes, use is:note - all your notes will come up in the search pane. To refine the search, I use tags for important notes. 5. Tag, you're it. Speaking of tags, they're not just for breakfast anymore! Tags used to be the realm of serious internet users, geeks and photographers. No more! If you're not already doing so, make use of the '+' button below and try to add at least one tag to your wave. You don't have to include every tag known to man, but a couple that capture the gist of your wave is handy. After a while, tagging becomes quick and easy and you can almost do it without thinking. The brain seems to like to put things in boxes, and tagging as a discipline is not all that hard. The benefits are enormous, as tags are the key to easy searching for you and everyone else. You'll be grateful you did later when you have hundreds of waves in your collection, and you're looking for just one from about 3 months ago... 6. Side by side waves. There are many times when you want to have two waves open side by side. This is actually very easy. Open your first wave in the normal way. Then ctrl-click on the second wave to be opened. (You can open many waves at the same time in this way.) Finally, minimise the search pane by clicking on the minimise icon on the top-right of the pane. Voila! |