Category Archive for The Web 2.0

A new look for the Ideum portfolio and blog

As the Web has evolved, so has our portfolio. I’ve always believed that a strong portfolio site not only demonstrates our capabilities, but also reflects our approach towards design and technology. This is our fifth portfolio site in less than seven years and while it is never easy to find the time to redesign, we’ve always managed to squeeze it in between projects. There were several motivating factors at play here for this redesign. First, as screen size has grown over the last few years…

Radical Trust

On the Assembly blog, Catherine Styles posted a paper she presented at the Austrailan Historical Association conference, How Web 2.0 will change history. It contains a brief introduction to Web 2.0 and some examples from mostly Australian websites. One concept (and term) in the paper that clearly stuck out was radical trust. There is one aspect of the Web 2.0 landscape that is really significant for publishers, whether they are cultural institutions like archives or libraries or museums, or historians like yourselves. Web…

Museums and the New Web: Online Forum

The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) will be hosting a 10-day online forum starting Wednesday, September 6th. I will be moderating the forum along with Kevin von Appen and Ken Dickson of the Ontario Science Centre (RedShiftNow), Bryan Kennedy of the Science Museum of Minnesota (Science Buzz), and Rick Bonney of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (Web Designs for Interactive Learning: WIDL). All of us contributed to the July/August issue of ASTC Dimensions magazine. The forum will focus on how science…

More ExhibitFiles

There are some new items of interest on the ExhibitFiles development blog since my last post in early July. You’ll find the results of our Design Workshop held in Berkeley in June, a front-end study by Randi Korn & Associates, and a great post by Kathy McLean about the project which includes her article, We Still Need Criticism. We’ve starting to get comments from the exhibit developer community, which is really helping the design process. The project itself is unusual in…

“A model recycling Google Maps mashup”

The Google Maps mashup we developed for the City of Torrance, “Where to Recycle,” is featured today on Google Maps Mania. (The permanent link is here.) This blog is the “unofficial” authority on everything Google Maps. The review briefly explains how our mashup works and ends with a very positive statement, “In my view, this kind of mashup should be present in every city website!” We’d like to see that happen, too. As I mentioned before, the key motivation for developing the…

Museums and the New Web: The Promise of Social Technologies

Museums and the New Web: The Promise of Social Technologies, an article that I wrote for the Association of Science – Technology Center’s Dimensions Magazine is now available online. It is part of an issue that is focused on Web 2.0 technologies (although the term “social technologies” was used instead.) The article is similar in scope to two others that I worked on earlier this year: Museums and Web 2.0 for the Exhibitionist’s 25th anniversary issue and Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies,…

Where to Recycle, A Google Maps Mashup

Over the last two months, we’ve been working on our first Google Map Mashup using the Google Maps API. Our client has given us permission to release the site to solicit feedback. The application is (of course) in “Beta.” Where to Recycle in Torrance, California allows city residents to easily find recycling centers based on the items they wish to recycle. The concept is simple: the easier it is to recycle, the more recycling will happen. We conducted a card sort…

ExhibitFiles: Development Blog

For the last six months we’ve been working on an NSF-sponsored project called ExhibitFiles. It’s a three-year project and our mission is to “create the infrastructure for an active online community of informal science exhibit practitioners, including shared records of exhibition descriptions as a core feature.” Wendy Pollock from Association of Science-Technology Centers is the principal investigator and Kathy McLean from Independent Exhibitions is a co-PI. Ideum’s role is help design, and build the site which will launch this winter. We’re building it…

RailsConf 2006 or: How I Learned to Stop Wasting Time and Love Web Programming.

Last month I had the good fortune of attending RailsConf 2006 in Chicago, the first official international conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails. For those of you who are out of the web development loop, Ruby on Rails (or simpy Rails) is an open source web application framework written in the Ruby programming language. In short, the Rails framework gives developers the power to create powerful web applications quickly and sustainably using much less…

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