Category Archive for The Web 2.0

Museum Blog Survey: Follow up

We got quite a response from our “Museum Blogs and Community Sites Survey” last week. We received a number of pointers to additional blogs as well as rapid links from Hanging Together, Mario Bucolo Museums Blog, the Walker Art Center Blogs, NetSquared, Loreto Martin, and others. In addition, for the first time our blog received more visits that our portfolio site here at Ideum, in fact visitation was higher by a 2-to-1 margin. Our modest survey seems to…

A Survey of Museum Blogs & Community Sites

We’ve just finished our first survey of museum blogs and community sites. The complete report is available as a PDF at the bottom of this post. We found 26 sites and collected basic information about each. The sites range from Art Museum blogs to Science Museums community-sites to personal blogs about museums. Here’s a portion of the Summary and Methodology from the Survey… The purpose of this survey was to get a sense of the level of activity within the museum field when…

Museums and Web 2.0

Next week I will be speaking at a roundtable discussion called “E-Learning in Museums” for the Canadian Heritage Information Network in Ottawa. My presentation is simply entitled “Museums and Web 2.0.” For those attending, I wanted to make the presentation along with sources and links available. Also, I thought others might have some interest, as there is not much out on the Web about how museums are using 2.0 technologies. The presentation provides an overview of Web 2.0 and looks at the current…

Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies

A new paper Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies has just been posted on the Museums and the Web 2006 conference website. I had the pleasure of co-writing this paper with Kevin von Appen from Ontario Science Centre and Bryan Kennedy from Science Museum of Minnesota. Here's the abstract… A generation of new, easy-to-use "sociable technologies" is creating opportunities for museums to pioneer the creation of on-line communities. These communities can deepen and extend relationships with and among visitors, while moving museums beyond…

Wikipedia, Nature, and the Web 2.0

One of the more contentious issues surrounding the Web2.0 has been the accuracy (or lack of it) found in entries at Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit has been a favorite target of Nicholas Carr, who has become the unofficial naysayer of everything Web 2.0. In an often cited posting, The amorality of Web 2.0, Carr rips into Wikipedia and the Web 2.0 as the "Cult of the Amateur." In a more recent post, Carr looks at the widely reported…

State of the Blogosphere

I just came across an article on Technorati on the State of the Blogosphere (Part 2, Part 1 is here). Would you believe there are “50,000 postings per hour, and over 70,000 new weblogs created each day”? Some very interesting comparisions between the main stream media and blogs, and other analysis.

New and notable

I’ve come across some pretty interesting sites this week, most brought to my attention by friends and colleagues. Here’s three… Multitouch Screens -An interesting technology apparently patented by Apple. As one of the comments mentions, the interaction does resemble a scene from the movie “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise is sifting through photographs. Campfire – This comes from 37 Signals makers of Basecamp (which we use and really like.) Campfire is a group chat tool. Ning – A “new free and…

Solar Viewer mini

Yahoo! has just posted our new Widget, the Solar Viewer Mini. O.K., We know it is still a big widget, but compared to first Solar Viewer it is slimmer and who wants to see tiny images of the sun anyway. This version has “drawers” and scrollers to make it more compact. We’ve had nearly 2,000 downloads just today! Our previous solar viewer has over 38,000 downloads in a little over a month. We developed this widget for NASA’s Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum.

The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World

A bit of shameless promotion here for a course I will be teaching for the Cultural Resource Management Program at University of Victoria. It is a one-week intensive course looking at new and emerging technologies (a.k.a. The Web 2.0) and their applications for museums. It will be held the first week of June 2006. I taught a Web 1.0 version of this course a few times in 2002-2004, it always had a great mix of people from museums large and small. I know…