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 “unconference” of informal interactive sessions.

My speech will focus on some of the same issues I presented on back in February in Ottawa for the Canadian Heritage Information Network. However, the changes in the field since then have been remarkable and there are many new developments to talk about.

As the year began, there were only about 20 museum or museum-related blogs. Now there are nearly 90 listed in the museum blogs directory. In general, museums seem much more interested in the potential that social websites and other Web 2.0 technologies present. Also, we are just starting to see museums entering into existing social spaces such MySpace, YouTube, SecondLife, and Flickr. Obviously these new developments raise a host of new issues for the field.

I’ll post next from New Zealand and share some of the findings from the conference. You may want to check out Fresh + New blog next week too, as I imagine Seb Chan will be posting during the conference as well.

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