What is Google Wave? The latest from Google Labs, for now available only as a limited-distribution preview, Google Wave is---what? The ultimate collaboration tool? Really superior e-mail? The most ambitious (and confusing) web application ever created? These things and more, according to The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

The Guide itself is a free, ever-changing experiment in publishing that seeks to explain one of the most elaborate and bewildering Google inventions of all. Sample:

"Google Wave treats an email conversation with multiple recipients and senders as a document with multiple editors and writers. If you can make the conversations-as-documents and documents-as-conversations leap along with Wave, the system makes 100% more sense. "

The Guide is written by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash, both of Lifehacker fame. And it's also written by you, if you care to join.

The online version of the Guide will remain free and be updated continuously. The Guide will also be available eventually as a DRM-free PDF and an independently published softcover print book, due out early next year. (These will presumably not be free, but no details about specifics yet.)