If you’re one of the lucky folks who got into Google Wave this week, your excitement probably turned to “Now what?” when you logged in and realized you had no one to wave with. If anyone on your Google account’s Contacts lists also has Wave you’re set–but for some folks that’s no one, or just one person. I’ve gotten a few waves from people saying “I have no one to talk to, and you’re the only one on my list.”

If that happens to you, it’s time to break out the first search command every Wave newbie needs to know: with:public, which returns a huge moving sea of public waves anyone can read and update. There you can dive in, meet other wavers, see what’s possible with Wave, and ask how to do stuff. Wave documentation is building up fast and furious inside Wave, and since everyone’s new to it, everyone is asking questions and lending each other a hand.

via The First Google Wave Search You Must Know | Smarterware.

A couple of days ago Google announced something very interesting – Sidewiki. This creates an overlay on any website / url allowing a form of commenting and rating. Because this is linked to the browser, the site owners themselves have no say here – you can’t opt-in or opt-out. At one level this could be a move which forces every website into the social media space – whether they like it or not.

Powerful stuff – so I signed-up and at that point realised the sting in the tail. In order to work, your browser has to send Google details of your browsing. This gives Google the information it has been craving for a long time, largely without success thus far – identifiable data about individuals’ behaviour, not just anonymous links that come into a website.

via Google’s Sidewiki has a sting in the tail « Richard Stacy @ Stacy Consulting.

So here’s the deal with Wave: If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you’ll miss the boat. And it’s a big boat. If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture. Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code. I haven’t done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you’re going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.

via Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. – Jason Kolb re: the Future of the Internet.

In the coming months, Microsoft will unveil a Google Docs like product that will let users create and edit Office documents in the browser itself without requiring a copy of Microsoft Office software.

The product, known as “Office Web Apps”, will include online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Like Google Docs, Office Web Apps will be available for free and you can use it from all popular browsers on Mac or Windows PC even without the Silverlight plug-in.

How to get Microsoft Office Web Apps

Microsoft is expected to ship Office Web Apps alongside Microsoft Office 2010 sometime next year but here’s a simple hack that will help you access the preview version of Office Web Apps right now…

via Get Access to Web-based Microsoft Office Apps Now!.

Google on Thursday wrote in a blog post that “in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines…This is a very exciting change, as your published docs linked to from public Web sites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

via Your Google docs: Soon in search results? | Webware – CNET.

We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We recently made available over a million free public domain books for viewing and download from our web site. Reading digital books can be an enjoyable experience, but we realize that there are times when readers want a physical copy of a book. To that end, I’m excited to announce that we’re partnering with On Demand Books to allow readers to purchase public domain books digitized by Google from any Espresso Book Machine at bookstores and libraries around the world.

Here’s some video footage of the Espresso machine in action:

via Inside Google Books: Books Digitized by Google Available via the Espresso Book Machine.

SocialWok lays a social network on top of your email, Calendar, Docs, Sites and so on – something that the Google Apps suite was missing when being used as the main infrastructure for an organisation.

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

via Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA.