Photo by Will "Wavemaster" Parson

I’ve heard the question a few times, most often phrased something like, “What’s Google Wave…do I want it?” Well, after wringing a precious invitation from Jackie I gave Google Wave a go. I can say now that yes, you do want Google Wave…kinda.

The thing is, it’s just not done yet. Your first experience might go something like mine: quivering with excitement as a Google robot delivers an email with a link to your new Wave account, eyes darting across the screen as you realize your browser isn’t struggling to load all those glorious waves, the page is just blank.

Getting to the goods requires a little understanding of how things work, and I’ve watched a few official and unofficial videos introducing Google Wave. It seems everywhere I look for a guide, though, I run into the same frustratingly long video by Google (1hr 20min). So, like many things in life I think the best way to get a feel for Google Wave is to jump right in and start using it.

The first thing you want to do is invite a handful of your friends, if you’re a good person that is. If you’re like me, however, you’ll say screw them and enter a search with the phrase “with:public” and watch the window fill up with random Waves. For example, I caught an interesting wave about Furries.

Including that first phrase, you can search for anything in the dictionary: photography, photojournalism, cameras…anything.

The best part of Google Wave is that because no one is on it, practically every Wave begins with a few people helping each other figure out exactly how the hell to use this rig. This also means that nobody really knows how to use it, so if you’re looking for tips from experienced users I’m sure you’ll find plenty of hearsay and people bullshitting about Google Wave’s potential.

You’ll also find plenty of messy Waves, akin to an ocean full of seaweed. Most Waves resemble run-on threads like the ones you’ll find many online forums. I found myself going through a photojournalism Wave just deleting blank entries, left over from people probing the new interface with their cursors and inadvertently inserting reply windows. That’s at least one benefit of being able to edit other people’s entries.

Overall, it’s like a dank outpost on some cold Antarctic frontier. Your mere presence increases the population significantly on a lot of public waves. You’ll find your replies will soon freeze your browser like warm breath exposed to the elements (at least on my computer). A lot of features have yet to be implemented, and intuitive controls are hard to come by. That’s to be expected during the preview period, I’m sure.

Though, I already like it better than Twitter.

Firstly, at PDNPulse, Conor Risch has a summary of the speakers during the VII seminar at PhotoPlus, which resonated with me personally because it coincided with (or inspired, perhaps) the retooling of the Meridian format to be more hospitable to our own projects.  It was Katherine Harris, photography director at The Daily Beast, who pointed out the disparity between young photographers’ ideal clients (large printed publications) and what they actually read (online).

The next day, Greg Ceo recalled on his blog a similar discrepancy in a class of photography students; some of them wanted to go into photojournalism, but exactly none of them actually spent money on newspapers.

My obsession with National Geographic comes to mind.  Personally, I dream about putting my photo inside that classic yellow border, but I only read printed copies of NatGeo because I pilfer them from my parents’ house whenever I visit.

I think my new goal in life will be to have an online outlet that will publish any story I want to tell.  Oh…wait, I already have that.  I better get to work.

The Meridian redesign is coming very soon!

When I learned that David Alan Harvey’s Burn Magazine won the Lucie award for best photography magazine of 2009, I sensed some parallels with President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize – awarded not only for the good that’s been done, but to give more momentum to the change that is coming.

Burnmagazine.org, being the first online magazine to win a Lucie in its category, may have raised some eyebrows for its nontraditional format.  But the award was no fluke; Burn wasn’t even the only online nominee (Lunaticmag.com was also nominated).

This got me thinking once again about how easy it is, at least on a technical level, to publish a blog, or even a fully-fledged online magazine.

That was about when Kevin Costner whispered “If you build it, they will come” in the movie that runs in my head.  And so I’ve been hammering away at the keys, simultaneously updating and applying my slowly expanding knowledge of WordPress, PHP, and HTML…all in an attempt to upgrade the Meridian experience.

I’ve realized that Meridian has never really just been a collective with a website and…oh…a blog too.  The blog has been at the forefront from the beginning, both to highlight our hard work as well as to reach out to our fellow emerging journalists.  A clearer recognition that our blog can be (and has been) more than an online bulletin of our endeavors in other media outlets has necessitated a change.  Meridian is an outlet in an of itself.

So, the redesign I’ve been working on will more accurately reflect our mission by revamping the way we deliver articles.  Soon we will have a more attractive home for our finished projects in the Featured section, as well as categories for the resources we so often find and share, our behind-the-scenes anecdotes and the posts gleaned from our friends across the world.

Soon disappearing is our totally weak homepage that hasn’t done much besides provide a link to the blog. You will find all our articles directly at meridiancollective.org.  Make sure to update your RSS feed with the right address.