A majority of waves use straight-line comments to collaborate and interact in Wave. While it is understandable that most will not know all the features of Wave in the first two weeks, it is about time we take a look at a great way to keep wave’s clean and the conversation flowing.

This is also a great way to do ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ collaborations in Google Wave. Explaining the dynamics of in-text comments can be difficult, especially if you have not used Wave, please bare with me.

To attempt an in-text comment, go to a wave and pick a blip to comment on. Do you see the blip you want to comment? Good. Do not select the blip or try to ‘edit’ it from the side drop-down menu. Instead, find the area of the blip you want to comment on and highlight it with your cursor. With the text highlighted, go ahead and hit the ‘enter’ key.

If you selected text in the middle of a paragraph, your in-text comment will split the original paragraph and land right in the middle of the other persons comment. You should see a small conversation bubble in the other person’s text. If you select that bubble, your comment should collapse.

It may take several tries at getting this right but you can see from first hand experience how useful this could be, especially if you are collaborating on a piece and have only an observation and not a correction. The actual document can have comment through out but by collapsing all the comments; you will see the entire document without any comments.

In theory, this is a great tool and one I play to use often. This will make waves more organized and give participants to have side conversations without feeling guilty for ‘hijacking’ a wave.

WOW! We have covered a lot in the way of basics! I will post more in the coming weeks on the different ways to adapt newsletter like functions, polls and create ‘Author Profiles’ on Wave!

Thanks for reading! Thoughts? Suggestions? Questions?

Comment and I will see what I can uncover for you! Thanks again!