We are going to break this up into about eight steps. If you are only looking for the address for ‘Public’ to add to your contacts, skip to the bottom of the post. I do recommend you read this post, if none other, because we will be going over some very important information in relation to wave management and sabotage.

Step One: Write your Wave! You are going to make a new wave selecting the ‘New Wave’ button in the center panel next to the ‘search’ function. Go ahead and write what you would like in the wave and take your time. It is not a race.

Step Two: Take notice of your headline. If you look at the center panel in your Wave platform, you will be able to see the headline getting edited. The headline consists of the first two lines of the wave. When the headline is to your liking go ahead and move to the next step.

Step Three: Add Bouncy. If you don’t know who Bouncy is, go back to our post on Bouncy HERE.  Bouncy is a fundamental tool in preventing bots from hijacking your posts.

Step Four: Understanding ‘Public’ means forever – when you add ‘public’ to the wave, you will not be able to undo this and Google does not sound like they intend to have a way to undo this in the future. So know that once you add your wave for all to see, it cannot be undone. You also will not have any control over who comments or be able to eject human participants from a wave. If you think this could be a potential problem, consider making a wave with only certain participants added, for more control.

Step Five: Establish the Guidelines.

You may not be able to ‘bounce’ human participants, but you can set up some rules. Generally, rules like:

*Please do not edit others’ posts

*Please do not add bots or apps to this wave

*please refrain from cursing or crude conversation

*please use inline-text for side conversations

*please, only conversation pertaining to the topic at hand

Etc.

While you can’t eject users, you can add a simple *this wave is moderated to keep it on topic and clean for other users* or some phrasing similar. I, personally, moderate my waves by going through ever few days or so and deleting side conversations that do not pertain to the topic. I intend to add the note ‘This Wave was moderated on XX/XX/XXXX’ to show that there was further conversation, available for all to see if they go through playback.

In-text conversations are covered near the end of this post and are very helpful in keeping a wave clean and with new users; it is not common knowledge or practice yet. You can either leave directions on how to perform inline text (which we cover in a minute) or link to instructions on it.

Step Six: Finally! You are ready to add Public!

In your contacts panel, add: public@a.gwave.com even though it says the user doesn’t exist, hit ‘enter’ anyway. You should see the contact in your list of contacts, with an avatar of different shades of blank people and three little dots in the corner of the photo. Drag this, or add it via the ‘+’ button, into the wave you want to make public. BE SURE YOU ADD IT TO THE RIGHT WAVE! I don’t want to hear any horror stories.

Step Seven: Add tags. At the bottom of the wave you have created and now made public, you will see a little ‘+’ for adding tags. Go ahead and click it and add all the tags that are relevant to your wave.

Step Eight: Moderate your wave. It is very possible that one or two people will wonder in and start chatting about your topic and then start talking about something else. Conversation, naturally, flows like this. However, if someone is looking for your wave because it is titled ‘Makeup Tips for Clowns’ but the participants ‘hijack’ the conversation into show dogs…it is acceptable to delete their ‘off topic’ comments.

To delete a comment, click the drop-down menu arrow to the right of the comment blip and select ‘delete’ from the menu. It will not remove it from playback. It will clean up the wave. You can always add a ‘moderated last: Aug. whatever’ if you want, but most will not care, they will just be glad it is clean and not four hundred miles long.

It is also a good idea to instruct your participants how to use inline conversation. This will also help to keep the wave clean. An inline conversation means a little conversation-blip will appear for the series of the on-topic-side-conversation that can be collapsed easily.

Right now the Google Wave Team is working on having inline conversations automatically collapsed whenever a wave is first opened, but for the time being, you have to manually collapse the in-line every time it is opened. It just gives the option to close a long conversation that a person may or may not be interested in.

Getting Hijacked: sooner or later, Spam is going to hit Wave. There are some spammers already, slightly, but nothing serious. Right now, the only way to get rid of a human spammer is to try to report them to Google Wave.

But your wave could get hijacked by a bot too. Some bots, while entertaining at first, can be very disruptive. For example, Flippy is a bot that flips all text in a post upside down. That can be bad if dropped into an information wave.

This is why I highly recommend acquainting yourself with Bouncy, the bot that bounces other bots.

I hope that this post was helpful. I know it was long and I covered a lot of information. Be sure to post a comment with any questions, suggestions or thoughts! As always, thanks for reading!