Effective “Wave”ing

Today something happened that will forever cement the importance of Google Wave in my mind. Something simple, yet so profound that I believe we are finally starting to see real world purpose for Google’s latest creation.

It started much like all of my days start, wake up, hit the computer, logged on to Twitter to check what I missed while I was asleep, caught up and started re-tweeting and @ replying to deserving the parties of the morning. It was during my catching up session that one tweet from @iwantmedia gave me a moment of pause…

“Citadel Broadcasting, third-largest U.S. radio broadcaster, plans to file for

bankruptcy http://bit.ly/4GRZ6C“

This is home for a couple of reasons. One, I am a former employee of the Stockton chain of Citadel-owned stations and worked for three years in various positions in the company. Two because of my interest in all things media and my extreme hatred for corporate owned radio stations I got a sick sense of satisfaction that the big boys are starting to feel the burn of their own wrongdoings.

Anyway, I posted my find on my own Twitter at 9:56am and mere minutes later, I see on my Google Wave that a new message has popped from our local newspaper’s web editor relaying my message and seconds after that, a story appeared on the paper’s website.

I was amazed at how fast that story went from a tweet to a story and even more amazed that I could actually have an effect in the decision of what is news in my city. This is very encouraging and gives me hope that my vision of the future of media is not at all off.

So what does this mean? It means that more than letters to the editors, these social outlets that we have at our disposal are powerful in the sense that the powers that be can read then instantly and can take action just as quickly. I am sure that all it took was a quick phone call to the Citadel office to get a quote from the GM, but the point is, it was my tweet that set that whole chain in motion.

The weapons in the arsenal of the public are now powerful enough to influence the news. If we can get enough of the right people in on the action here is Stockton, we can truly be one step closer to having a strong media presence in out city and emancipate ourselves from Sacramento in the next five years.

It can happen…all it takes is a tweet and a wave…