One of the big criticisms of Google Wave is that people don’t see how they can use it for anything productive. My post yesterday on 60 Free Online Tools for Organizing was based on a crowdsourcing effort with Colin Curtis and Sarah Burris using Wave, and I wanted to give a brief description of how it worked.

The first thing I did was create a Wave, start of the list, and add a comment to it explaining what I wanted to do. I added Colin and Sarah to the Wave and from there were started dumping all of our potential resources onto that first post.

Once we had a pretty big list, I created a comment below it to organize resources into categories with the links to each tool. This functioned as the main outline to the post combined with our notes from the first list.

Throughout the process we used the comment functionality to explain why certain resources should or should not be included, as well as anything else pertaining to the post.

Since it seemed to work so well, I created a tag called “Post Ideas” that I now use for Waves discussing potential posts. I can filter my inbox to only show these, which provides a good resource for posting in the future.

And that’s how we did it. Wave allowed us to combine the document collaboration of Google Docs with an easy to follow thread of discussion that drove the development of the post. While it worked extremely well with only a couple of people involved, it is possible that a large number of collaborators could make the process bulkier and harder to follow.

Have you used Google Wave effectively as a productivity tool? Did you try it out after reading this post? Share your experiences in the comments.