Future:Media:Change

The 99th, 100th, or 101st International Women’s Day (depending on your math), was quiet on the web and avoided Twitter trending. However, Yahoo! jumped in where Google faltered with their own special logo and page celebrating women.

The Pew Research Center have released the fourth version of their ” The Future of the Internet” series, which is pulled together from surveys and questions to leading digital thinkers and figures around the world.

By combining satellite imagery with the power of cloud computing, Google is helping scientists identify where deforestation is occurring across the globe. According to a TechCrunch article, Google plans to release a prototype service free of charge that will use images from Google Earth to analyze changes in forestation across time.

Today Google gave an early Christmas gift and spread out significantly more invites for Google Wave to existing users. A Mashable article reported that the fledgling service will soon hit 1 million users and will continue to grow as invites are spread out.

Google recently published some of their Google Wave user survey results. The most obvious finding is that Google Wave is more fun with your friends. This was to be expected, but it highlights the reality that Wave will run up against the same brick wall that renders most collaboration tools useless in organizations: Adoption.

With Google only a month old, already organizations are already finding unique ways of integrating the technology to fit their needs. Will Google Wave become the Segway of the internet or will it live on to become something totally new? Is your nonprofit on Wave? What are they doing? Let’s take a page from the private sector and figure out some cool ways of integrating Wave into our operations.

Google adds World Bank data to their visualization of search results as they try to “do no evil,” while staying ahead of upstart search engine Wolfram Alpha (recently partnered with Microsoft’s Bing). It’s a move in the right direction, but my simple attempts to find the number of Twitter users in Africa, or discover the maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone, show that Google and their competitors still have a ways to go.