Author Archive for Jim Spadaccini

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…

Remembering Nagasaki

Today is the 61st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The event was marked as it is each year, with a moment of silence at the city’s Peace Park near “ground zero.” Eleven years ago on the 50th anniversary, while I was at the Exploratorium, I was involved in producing a website, Nagasaki Journey (with Ali Sant, Susan Schwartzenberg and others) which included photographs taken the day after the bombing. A Japanese Army photographer Yosuke Yamahata captured the devastation…

“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…

LA Times Calendarlive.com: Now on exhibit, the blogger’s view

An article by David Ng, Now on exhibit, the blogger’s view is in today’s Sunday Los Angeles Times. The article mentions our own MuseumBlogs.org site and starts by looking broadly at the museum blogging community: Within this small community, blogging can assume many guises. Some museums have dedicated staff who collectively write the blog entries and review visitor comments. Others entrust their blog to one person — an artist in residence or a curator — who uses the site as an official diary…

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…

Rainbows over Pueblo Bonito

We just back from a quick weekend trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. For those of you who are familiar with Ideum, you probably know that we’ve been involved with the park over the last few years, and have developed the website and a book for NASA’s Traditions of the Sun project focusing on archaeoastronomy in Chaco Canyon. This weekend we were in the park to help photograph a possible lunar alignment, but due to cloud cover, that didn’t quite turn…

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