Over the weekend, I read a Mashable post by Leah Betancourt about how Google Wave is changing news already, despite the limited numbers of actual Google Wave users so far as its beta testing continues.

There are 4 examples of how media companies are using Google Wave given in the post.

• Using Waves to Foster Engagement
• Using Waves As ‘Town Squares’
• Wave as a Newsroom Content Planning Tool
• Turning Blog Posts Into Public Waves

Fostering engagement is something that Mashable’s Betancourt points out is being done at places like the Chicago Tribune’s Redeye blog. Redeye sent out its first public wave on November 10 and has been sending out a daily one since then. Their participation in the waves lasts a half hour (the wave itself keeps going) and discuss the cover story that day. They end the wave by taking suggestions from their readers. The wave is promoted via Twitter and on their website.

The Austin American-Statesman is given in the Mashable post as an example of using waves as town squares. They have started two waves and report that it gets troublesome to keep the wave on topic after 50 blips or so. They seem to be using it to engage their readers as well, just in a different way than Redeye. This model seems to be one that I like so far, if combined with a couple of the other examples.

Betancourt next gives the example of The Tampa Tribune, TBO.com and WFLA. These outlets share a common online editor and they use Google Wave to keep track of all the stories they are working on everyday so that everyone in the “converged” newsroom can see what is going on. The editor can track the stories that are in the pipeline through this wave everyday.

Andrew Nystrom and Mark Milian have discussed How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism and even embedded a blog post of that topic into Google Wave. Mashable’s Betancourt summarizes it thusly, “Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process.”

As I read the original post, some ideas hit me. After I got my Google Wave account a few weeks ago, I found it very useless at first, since hardly anyone I knew was on there yet to collaborate. The second week I had an account I discovered public waves and how to search for them. I parlayed this into finding several regional waves for Baltimore and DC that I have since used for networking. I also found a few waves for interests I have and the discussion there has been good. I even started some regional/local waves in hopes of helping the other people I knew on Wave at that point do some networking as well as add their friends to these waves to get more people together. I have noticed in the past week or so that there seem to be a lot more contacts I know on Wave but I’m not sure if that’s due to accelerated invitations by Google and other users or it’s just finding people I hadn’t found before who were already there.

In light of Betancourt’s post and my own rudimentary experiments with Google Wave I started a “news wave” yesterday on Inside Charm City, a Baltimore blog that I publish. I cherry-picked a handful of news items from yesterday’s headlines, mainly the ongoing Sheila Dixon trial and jury deliberations, and invited a few people in Baltimore on Google Wave to participate. It was promoted in a blog post and on Twitter. By the end of the day, the wave had grown to 29 participants and 47 messages (or blips if you prefer.)

Today, I started a wave and embedded this morning’s news roundup post into it. The discussion today so far includes 43 participants and 39 blips. I am going to probably embed this evening’s news roundup post into the Wave as well.

I see my posts as fusing some of the techniques given in the Mashable post. I hope to engage our readers more and I also hope to do some event-based waves. Had I been far enough along in the process of using Wave, I would have started a wave just for the trial of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon. I think that one would have been a really big continuing one, but I think there may have been problems keeping up with it or reigning it in if it strayed off-topic. Perhaps letting it go for a couple of days and then migrating to a new wave would be the way to go in a longer event-based wave.

I like the idea of embedding blog posts in a wave to help start discussion and conversation. That seemed to cause more conversation today than just mentioning some news items did yesterday. Today and yesterday both provided people with a sandbox to test out different functions in Google Wave that they weren’t sure about. I have yet to embed any graphics, videos or Google gadgets. I will be going in that directions next probably. I had avoided it so far because I was unsure how big the waves would get and whether some of these add-ins might make it unwieldy and cause freezes.

I really appreciate Leah Betancourt’s great post on this topic and all of the great ideas she was able to assemble from  various media people around the country. I have definitely progressed from the first few days of logging in to Google Wave and wondering what I was supposed to do with it next.