In the tradition of two Jews having three opinions, our friends at PresenTense have made the impossible happen: they’ve published the new issue of their magazine (their tenth) as the first-ever Google Wave magazine. You can read it here if you have Wave, or you can post in PresenTense’s comments section to get an invite.
What does that mean for the Jews? Or, to put it in simpler terms — What does that mean? Analyzing the technological or moral applications Most people, even people with a Gmail address, aren’t on Wave yet — or, like me, they are, and they don’t know what the hell Google Wave does. The closest I’ve come to an authoritative explanation* is what Meredith told me: “It’s like email, if email was invented today, and you edit emails once they’ve already been sent or argue with every line of an email.”
In other words: it’s email in the form of an argument.
There are articles on “going digital,” Israeli internet startups, and how to make a mash-up between a hip-hop song and a 500-year-old Yemenite melody. (That last article was written by our own Miriam Brosseau of Stereo Sinai.
The design is innovative in other ways, too — the mag integrates discussion forums, video, and streaming music. But the most fun (or, hopefully, when people get the hang of it) will be the discussions that can literally spiral out of an article, where people suggest changes to articles that can be implemented — or debated — with the author. Which is, both historically and in this brave new digital era, what Jews have proven to be so talented at.
* — Okay, I did find out one more cool thing about Google Wave: that it was named after the communication technology in the science fiction/western Firefly.
