I have not been so interested by a new technology as I am by Google Wave. Right off the bat, I can think of several applications within the higher ed environment ranging from education to administrative. For example, in advanced networking labs such as the Internet2 IPv6 or multicast workshops I teach or the Cisco classes that I used to teach, there are sets of equipment that would be worked on by a small group of students. In all cases, it usually ends up being a clump staring at the screen of one of the team members typing on a router or a switch. In some cases, each of the groups also needed to interact with the other groups. I can think of many other examples where collaboration is key. So far, I have just been playing around with a few of the robots and gadgets that developers have made available. I suspect that there will be many, many more soon. One of them that I was interested in trying is apparantly not ready outside of the sandbox environment. My blog, http://blog.machida.us/ is hosted at Blogger (owned by Google) and they demonstrated a robot called Bloggy that enabled a wave to appear within your blog. Unfortunately, to interact with it, I believe you would still need a wave account.

Another capability is to set up an independent wave server so that the user accounts can be locally administered. Even with a separate server, users would still be able to transparently interact with wave users in other domains. Only shared content would be passed between the domains. Pretty cool technology that I can't wait to learn more about. And that is a really nice change for me. I.e. to be so excited about a technology that I want to learn everything I can about it...

This blog post is being typed in a wave with a Posterous robot. Once I finish, it posts to my Posterous site http://pst.machida.us/, and the Posterous site posts it to my Blogger site, then sends out a Tweet with a link to the Posterous blog post. Cool automation.

Another Google Wave Experiment
This is an experiment for drag and drop using Google Gears along with the Posterous robot. I just drag and dropped a photo from my iPhoto Library into the web browser. This is a photo I took last week from the West Ridge of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus around 8 in the morning. I especially like the way the moon looked and some of the clouds (which didn't turn out very well) and I see that there was a little iPhone shake. But I still like the colors.

I guess it didn't work. The drag and dro worked fine but the picture didn't show up here. I am anxious to see the Bloggy robot make it into the preview because it really looked cool in the demo. My blog is at http://blog.machida.us/

Playing With Google Wave
I got my invite this afternoon just before 5:00 and have been playing around all evening. Right now I'm trying out the Posterous robot which automatically makes blog posts though the posterous.com site. So far it seems pretty cool. Not all of the robots used in the demo video can be used (such as bloggy which posts to Blogger).

I just tried to paste a picture and I guess that is't supported in the robot. I need to find some others to try some of the collaborative features. Pretty cool!

I just got back from WIN Walk number 9. Participation in ten are required to get the big prize. A water bottle. Isn't it amazing what some of is do these days. For me that was just enough of an incentive to show up for the noon and 5 pm walks for five weeks. I sort of had a conflict today bit it was important enough to me to leave the call-in early so I could make it down to Wood Center for the start of the walk. It is still really smokey but it isn't hovering at ground level. It is thick enough so you can't see the sun and temperatures today are pretty cool especially compared to yesterday.

This afternoon, I took another long walk. This was partly because I forgot my pre-lunch medication and walking seems to do wonders with moderating my blood sugar. It is still very smokey with visibility under a mile so I went out of my way to not exert myself. I hadn't walked through the Potato Field out to Smith Lake this year so it seemed like a good idea. I also walked around the perimeter of the T-Field and noticed that there was a lot of activity that I am assuming is associated with some sort of research project. Last month, I noticed a lot of tubes with some sort of tree outside of the greenhouse located near the Butrovich Building. These look pretty similar to whatever they were working on there. Anyway, I got in a good seven miles overall which is less than I would like but given the miserable air quality, it is probably a reasonable number of miles. Usually, while walking on the trails, I see al of other people out walking or running but today, not so many. It is supposed to be raining soon especially since the fair starts this weekend. After all, it always seems to rain during the fair.