Category Archive for Web 2.0 Sites

Ideum Blog is Five Years Old Today

Back in 2006, when we started blogging, we weren’t really sure where it would lead. At the time, we were interested in Web 2.0 technology and how it might be best used by the museum field. Five years, 259 posts, and 3,561 comments later, the changes we’ve seen to both the web and the museum fields have been dramatic. In March of 2006, we conducted a survey of museum blogs and community sites and found 26 sites, most of them begun within a…

ExhibitFiles New “Bits” Feature

The ExhibitFiles Website is a community site for exhibit designers and developers. Almost three years ago now, Ideum worked with the Association of Science -Technology Centers and Independent Exhibitions to help design and develop the site. Created with funding from the National Science Foundation, the purpose of the site is share design practices and provide access to resources that can improve exhibit design. Last week, we launched a new feature called “Bits,” which best described on the ExhibitFiles site itself: A Bit is an…

Ideum Portfolio Redesign: WordPress, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube Integration

We’ve just launched a redesign of our portfolio site and blog. The site aggregates content from our Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube sites, embedding it in our new website.  For now, we’ve added simple links to our Facebook and Linked In pages. We may expand our integration with these sites in the future. Along with extending our reach into these social networking platforms, the site is easier to maintain and update. The site is powered by WordPress. While…

Memory Maker

Digital New Zealand is an initiative to “test new ways to create digital content, collect and share existing digital content and build smart, freely available search and discovery tools.”  While Digital NZ is just getting started, today they’ve launched the Memory Maker to mark the 90th Anniversary of the signing of the Armistice ending World War One. This interactive online video mashup uses EditorOne to let visitors create their own short videos using  historic video images, still photographs, artifacts, music and…

Planning for Social Sites

In designing Websites that have a social dimension we’ve learned the importance of developing a social networking plan. While the standard methods of Web design -such as wireframes and mockups– are still part of the process, we’ve been concurrently working on plans for social interaction. Back in 2006, when we developed the American Image site, which uses Flickr, we learned the hard way that failing to properly plan for social interaction can have negative ramifications. The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr.

Alexa Ranking and RSS Mixer

Along with looking at Google analytics, Google crawl stats, and other server-based statistics we’ve been tracking RSS Mixer’s Alexa Ranking. The figures we see on Alexa are certainly encouraging, even at this early date. (RSS Mixer has been out there for less than a month.)  Yesterday, RSS Mixer was ranked the top 23,527 site in the world on Alexa. With literally hundreds of millions of Websites out there we’re very pleased to see this. Alexa Rankings are determined by…

Scaling RSS Mixer – Analyzing Google Crawl Stats

The public alpha for RSS Mixer has now been up for a week. The site started out with around 18,000 feeds in the directory. These were added over the last year, since the launch of the initial prototype last summer. The count now stands at 24,000–a relatively large increase for our first week. This total number of feeds translates into nearly 3 million posts in the RSS Mixer directory. A mention in Mashable! (RSS Mixer Makes Mashup Easier), along with a number of…