Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is hosting the Digital Forum here in the capital city of Wellington. It’s a beautiful space, although honestly, I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to check out the exhibits (perhaps today). From what I’ve seen the museum contains a mix of art and artifacts with a focus of the taonga (“treasures” in the Maori language) of New Zealand. They also have a Kid’s Zone which contains hands-on exhibits and programs…
Tomorrow I’m off to New Zealand for the National Digital Forum 2006: Participating with Communities: Digital opportunities, collaborations and celebration. I’ll be presenting a keynote entitled, Museums and Web 2.0. Other folks from abroad such as Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, Toby Travis from the Victoria Albert Museum, and Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art will also be presenting, along with a number of speakers from New Zealand. It should be a very interesting week concluding with an…
I’ve finally found the time to put together quick post about the course I taught last week at the University of Victoria up in British Columbia. The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World focused on Web 2.0 technologies and techniques and their potential uses in the museum world. While the heart of the week-long course was comprised of face-to-face discussions and small-group design “challenges,” we utilized a number of Web 2.0 technologies as well. Of course we had a blog…
Recently, we tried our hand and developing a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, the Solar Viewer. We built the Yahoo! Widget version earlier in the year with some success–at least as far the number of downloads are concerned. Having developed now for two of the more popular widget platforms (we haven’t looked at Google Gadgets, Opera Widgets, or DesktopX, yet) there are few interesting sites in Dashboard and Yahoo! Widget world worth pointing out. These sites are great for finding new…
Real World Software Development has posted an enormous list of Web 2.0 sites, the Best of the Best Web 2.0 sites. All of these site are (of course) checked by the Web 2.0 validator. Which is one step above (or below?) the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator. The list is extensive, but surprisingly there’s no mention of LibraryThing, Shelfari (which we wrote about recently, Our new (Beta) bookshelf on Shelfari), and Whatsonmybookshelf. Also missing is BlueDot (social bookmarking),…
Today is Election Day in the U.S. and we are once again reminded that voting is a right. (It is not a privilege as our highest elected official stated just this morning.) Over the last week or so we’ve come across some interesting sites worth sharing. First, if you need to know where to vote go to Vote411.org. For an interesting experience in viewing the results, there is an election mashup that combines Google Earth and Google Maps (CNET has the story). It…
Flash is a great technology for presenting information to the user in an interesting, fun, functional and predictable way. It’s installed on nearly every internet-capable machine on the planet, and it’s perfect for deploying a rich media-driven experience. Despite its advantages the system has several noticeable drawbacks. Current cross platform support is uneven (although Flash 9 promises support for Linux, Mac, and Windows), textual content is displayed using a flash-specific renderer (native OS/WM text support is more functional, IMHO), and…
The Association of Science-Technology Center’s (ASTC) annual conference starts this weekend, hosted by the Louisville Science Center (pictured right). This year I’m co-presenting, The Next Wave: Emerging Internet Technologies at Museums with Bryan Kennedy, and Kevin von Appen.
Shelfari (Beta, of course) is “a virtual shelf to show your books” and “connect with your friends.” It’s an interesting concept and parts of it are well done, although some the limitations in organizing your shelf became apparent soon after I began to add books. It would be great to be able to reorder, or otherwise create categories (in ways other than using opinions or star ratings), but perhaps this is in the works as this site only launched this month. Our shelf…
