The Geekorium

I had my first taste of international communication today thanks to Google Wave. David Alviz runs an excellent Spanish Google Wave site called WAVEsfera. He keeps up with the latest bots and gadgets, and writes very well. A while ago it might have been a small problem that his site is entirely in Spanish. Translation has been around for a while on the web now, but it involved taking note of the site and plugging it into Babelfish or something similar. Now I have translation built right into Chrome. when I visit WAVEsfera, it asks if I want it automatically translated. Similarly, I’ve subscribed to the site in Google Reader, and it translates the site for me too! So far so good, no reason not to subscribe to international sites any more!

Then I got to thinking. I’m getting in touch with some of the people who have read First Waves, and realised that it’s the perfect chance to try Aunt-Rosie, one of the original bots released with Wave. So I fired up a wave and added WAVEsfera and the translation bot. I selected the destination language and started typing.

It was true magic.

My amazement at watching my words translated as I type is like that of a caveman witnessing fire. the experience is so novel and potentially life changing. Imagine a world where language is no longer a barrier for communicating with anyone. Think of the potential for learning!

I’m full of excitement for the world of tomorrow enabled by real-time communication and translation. We’re so close to realising the universal translator of Star Trek that I can almost taste it.

In a site note: Inspired by my discoveries, I’ve enabled instant translation to each of my posts. I know I’ve had visitors from Germany, Ireland, the USA, France, Spain, the Czech Republic and Turkey just today! If you want to read First Waves in your language, check out the “[Translate]” button beneath each post. If you’re an international reader, I’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment, or wave me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and don’t forget to add aunt-rosie@appspot.com!

Edited image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0

In honour of a couple of Wave extensions that allow wave-to-email collaboration, I thought I’d try something light-hearted instead of my usual wordy post. Mr-Ray is a bot/gadget combo from wave.to, that lets you add people to a wave by their email address, and they get sent a stripped back version of the wave that they can use to collaborate with you, without having to figure out and navigate the full-blown Wave interface. Embedded below is an example of the interface the email user sees. Please note, this isn’t the way the developers recommend using Mr-Ray - the address should be kept secret to avoid people posing as you. In this case, I KNOW it’s not me!

I’ve got a short holiday thanks to Easter, so I’ll leave this up until Wednesday to get to know my readers and give the non-wavers a chance to see a little bit how it works. I’ll check back regularly to reply so you come back too! If you’re already on wave and want to reply as you, contact me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and I’ll add you directly.

[ This used to be an embedded view of a Wave. Technology comes and goes and we lose even the archives of what we had. ]
Fullscreen Version

Updated: Added static view of the wave for reference.

While attempting to complete my first group assignment as an external student at University, I realised how much harder it was than while I was an internal student.  If you’re an internal student you see each other at least once a week,  making it hard to ignore the fact you have an upcoming assignment. Also you actually get to meet and talk with people and elect  to be in their group (if the group selection process is left to the students). Being external, I had to post a random post on the discussion board and hope I was choosing the right people. And then hope they didn’t ignore my emails or wait a month or so to reply.

Google Wave would have been one of the best tools for this group assignment. Email meant a group of four people were all individually emailing each other and also at times emailing all four of the group. I ended up with snapshots of what was happening, who was having what role, and what the plan was. With Google Wave, all the communication would have been in one Wave, or even multiple, but it would have been available for the group to read and to add and edit. The plan of the assignment, of who was writing what, and how we were writing it could have been kept at the top of the wave, and edited as needed. The parts assigned to individuals could have been put in the wave and the group could know exactly where the assignment was up to, and edit other’s parts as we went.

The two main features of Google Wave which would have positive affects on a university group assignment, would have been the real time editing and the ability to highlight. Real time made it more like conversation, without having to wait for emails to be sent, or having to work out who could possible meet in the City to catch up. Highlighting would allow those edits to be prominent or for individuals to reinforce any point they needed to make.

One of the biggest complaints from first time Google Wave users is the tidal wave of information and updates that threatens to suck their precious time away as they watch the chaos unfold.

In a carefully tended wave, the noise and chaos are minimal, but in some of the larger (public) waves, users have given up hope of ever keeping on top of it all.

Charles Lehner has created a simple chat gadget that might help calm the swell, by focussing some of the chat into a form most of us will recognise: IM. By introducing this gadget to a wave, you can give people an outlet to speak that brings in years of built up convention for managing the flow. People understand Instant Messaging, so you can add this gadget to bring  normalcy to the new medium.

Perhaps you could embed this in a wave and encourage people to use it for idle chitchat, leaving the rest of the wave for the real-time collaboration on the task at hand.

As with other gadgets the Playback function records every new person who gets to the chat, and every message, so be aware that this can blow the size of your wave recording out with a lot of extra updates to wade through if necessary.

“Retro“ Chat for Google Wave [Wave Samples Gallery]

Online communication fraught with peril. An innocent conversation with a friend can turn nasty in seconds with the slip of misplaced word. Umpteen times this week I have put my foot in my mouth, or written something only to spend the rest of the day worrying if what I wrote might have offended someone. Written communication has never been so difficult. Why has it gotten harder, the more ways we have to communicate?

Of course everyone knows that written communication is less effective at conveying emotion and subtleties of meaning than face-to-face conversations do. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a grimace and a hug, I’d say are worth far more. But online is how many of us choose to interact these days (it’s quicker and lets you continue to do other things while chatting) for better or worse, and we need a way to communicate that puts across our full meaning.

I hate writing. Not because I’m particularly bad at it,¹ but because once I start I feel the need to qualify everything I say with insight to show that I am not as dumb as my words would make me seem. I do it face to face too (which I suspect might be even more painful for the receiver than my written parentheses) because I can’t bear the thought of someone thinking I haven’t thought about what I’m saying enough to see the other side. When I write it though, it increases the effort I have to put in to produce something I’m happy with, and litters my writing with brackets and footnotes. If I’m not prepared to put that sort of effort in I just don’t write.

I’m kinda feeling the same way about Twitter too. Now with 140 characters, it might seem I shouldn’t have that problem, but the limit is exactly what make me nervous about tweeting. With so few words, how can anyone possibly make themselves completely understood? Most of the time it’s not a real issue, as what I say is fairly innocuous, but occasionally the limit can really hack meaning from your words and leave you with something that is drastically misinterpreted.

Personal chat is even worse. You think you have more scope to make yourself understood, but it’s much more immediate and often words come out, when you really should have thought about it more. It also gives you the illusion of knowing someone better than you actually do, so something you might say face to face with someone you know well sounds rude or mean in a chat.

Online communication has rendered my entire vocabulary meaningless in this new context. Words and their equivalent emotions are often entirely different online. We add emoticons and abbreviations such as LOL that we wouldn’t use in real life.² My favourite emoticon is colon-p ( :P ) which is my get-out-of-jail-free card for saying something that might be taken badly without it. It really is a cheap cop-out when a re-write or complete scrapping of the text might be a better option. I hate myself for using LOL and :D as I’m pretty sure my mother “taught me better than that”.

But the alternative is thinking everything through too much. and like I’ve said that doesn’t make me write better, it makes me not write. I had to just write this post, or risk never seeing it written, so you’ll forgive it’s slapdash nature.³

I would like to develop my online vocabulary. I’m not sure what that entails though. I suspect using Twitter has helped, but I’m still coming up short when it comes to making myself understood. Perhaps it will just take time, like learning any new language or culture. Perhaps I will never master it.

How has your vocabulary changed due to online communication?