Review of Google Wave as a scholarly HTML editor
Jose Quesada:
It doesn’t work too well for long, structured documents
Having a large blip for the entire paper with many people editing it seems to perform poorly. And having each person write their own blip-per-paragraph is not very pretty. It’s in fact distracting. I don’t discard wave’s usability to go through the roof once people start making things with it (robots). But it all depends on how well the API is designed. For example, following the mailing list, it seems that there’s no easy way to reorder blips programatically. This sounds like bad design to me.
It might be bad design if Google Wave were crafted for that purpose. While the concept seems interesting, I don’t think we should even go down the road of using Google Wave as a collaborative tool in academia – yet.
