Tomorrow, I’m headed to Philadelpia for the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) annual conference. On Saturday, I’m presenting Web 2.0: A New Crossroads for Science Centers with Bryan Kennedy (Science Museum…
Twitter continues to rise in popularity and dozens of museums now use this micro-blogging service. While we have yet to employ Twitter with one of our museum clients, there are a diverse group of museums large and small already using Twitter. Just search for “museum” on Twitter and you’ll find a number of examples (such as the Discovery Center from Springfield Missouri below). It seems likely many more museums will follow in the coming months. Though we’ve just begun to build our own…
Mashable! (the #13 ranked blog in the world, according to Technorati) has just written a very positive article about RSS Mixer. Our launch last week competed with Google’s Chrome release, so it has taken a while for the story to get out there. (The lesson here is never release anything when Google has got something new to share.) In the article, the writer, Doriano “Paisano” Carta, goes through many of RSS Mixer’s features including; widget output, OPML support, and the Firefox Add-on. After all the…
If you have a Twitter account, you probably already have blog, a Facebook page, a Flickr account, a YouTube account along with other points of presence on the Web. For many of our museum clients, managing this extended presence with limited resources is a constant challenge. So anything that comes along that makes this process easier is of great interest. This week we created a Twitter site for RSS Mixer. I wanted to find a way to help keep this Twitter site up-to-date…
The RSS Mixer site is now available! The new alpha release has a ton of new features, a new database structure, and it is running on our own custom-built, dedicated servers. Here’s a brief description of the site from our press release… RSS Mixer (www.rssmixer.com) is a free service that allows visitors to efficiently mix multiple Web feeds into one. The mixed feed is then viewable as a new…
An article that I wrote for the July/August issue of the Association of Science-Technology Center’s Dimensions magazine is now available online. Appropriately for these economic times, the issue focuses on ways in which science centers can save money and do more with less. The article, Nine Free or Nearly Free Ways Museums Can Take Advantage of Web 2.0 covers a variety of Web-based services and touches on some of the open source initiatives that are now available to museums. I also list a number…
Last July, we posted a prototype Web application, RSS Mixer that allowed anonymous visitors to mix RSS (and Atom) feeds together. Back then the page got a lot of notice. There was a blog post from Mashable, one from CNET’s Webware, a brief article in Brazil’s largest newspaper, and literally hundreds of other links from all over the world. The prototype site continues to get traffic and it will surpass 5,000 user-generated mixes and added 10,000 feeds any day now. Next…
In January I will be teaching a one week intensive course for the Cultural Resource Management program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The course is entitled The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World, and as the title suggests, it explores the ever-shifting subject of social technologies and the ways they can be used in the museum world. The course looks at everything from blogging to YouTube and how this is slowly changing how museums approach Web development.
On Tuesday morning of this week, I showed a slide illustrating the growth of the museum blogosphere at the Association of Science-Technology Center’s annual conference. When I returned from the conference, I was surprised to find that the slide I had shown was already quite dated. My original slide, which I put together about 10 days ago, showed 211 blogs in Museum Blogs directory–today there are 233. We’ve received more than 20 new submissions to…
