Google Wave and Bing

If you've kept up with any of the tech buzz in the past week, you might have heard about Google Wave. It's Goog's soon-to-come (as in sometime this year) product that combines features of e-mail, messaging, collaboration and content management into one kind of super platform.

It's being built with a whole set of APIs designed not only to make it easy to create features within it but also to integrate it into other content, such as blogs and Web sites.

If you are in journalism, you need to pay attention to this -- heck, if for nothing more than the contextually smart spell check (about 45 minutes into the video). But consider a breaking news situation, say the plane that was forced to land in the Hudson River. The tech and journalism world was all a-twitter about Twitter and how it allowed eyewitnesses to post photos well ahead of mainstream media.

Imagine what happens if a collaborative group witnessing such an event has a tool as powerful as Wave. (One thing unclear to me is how a "wave" might be made generally public if you were not publishing to another site, but I suspect I just overlooked that.)

Here's Jeff Jarvis' take on it. Meanwhile, make time to look at the hour and 20-minute video.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has come out with its latest search-engine foray, Bing. I tried it for a bit tonight, and it is a worthy tool to add to the kit. I still think Google gives me more relevant results faster, but Bing gave me some results on my name, for instance, that I'd forgotten about and almost never see that high up (first five pages) in Google. The contextual box that comes up when you mouse over a link also is nice.

I have to give it more of a try. But my suggestion is to start playing with it.