Public.Resource.Org a “new non-profit dedicated to the creation of public works projects on the Internet” has posted 6,288 images from the Smithsonian on to flickr. They have also written a memo addressed to “The Internet” which they describe their belief that these images are “overwhelmingly” in the public domain. Update(5-27-07): Boing Boing has more on the controversy.
For an upcoming project, we’re developing an application that automatically takes a snapshot of a Web page and produces a variety of thumbnail-sized images. This application was developed using Firefox on Linux along with some C programming and a little bit of Ruby on Rails development. Please try out this prototype: grab any site you like. Let us know how it works. Try the Site Screen Shot v.01 (Update August 6, 2007: We’ve taken web page image capture prototype down permanently. The…
The museum blogosphere is growing at a furious pace. In the first four months of the year, we saw 57 blogs added to the Museum Blogs directory. We’ve now surpassed 150 blogs and an astounding 20,000 aggregated posts on the site. Just last month, when Seb Chan and myself presented, Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere at the Museums and Web conference in San Francisco there were 139 blogs. Today, about three weeks later 13 more have appeared. Having just delivered…
For the past year we’ve been working with the Association of Science – Technology Centers in desiging and developing the ExhibitFiles, a community site for exhibit designers. (The image here is from the CB Radio exhibition which opened in 1978 and is part of the ExhibitFiles). The concept behind the site is simple, too often the exhibit and exhibition development process isn’t recorded for future designers and developers. As a community, we sometimes redesign the wheel as there is no central…
This week about 20 more photographs were added to the John Collier Jr. site on flickr (including this gem on the left taken in 1943 in Questa, New Mexico.) This is the first new set photos to be added since The American Image website went live back in January. (You can learn more about this project in our portfolio.) Our partners at the Maxwell Museum of the Anthropology will be adding more great Collier images over the next few months. The…
Yesterday, Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum and I presented our paper, Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere at the Museums and the Web conference. Following the presentation we had a lunchtime meet up and discussion about the future of museums and blogging. It was nice meet many of the folks beyond the blogs that I’m so familiar with. Here’s a round up of resources and posts from the session. Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere (the paper on the MW…
Today I’m conducting two half-day workshops at the Museums and the Web Conference in San Francisco. This blog post contains the workshop description and the course materials for Real Science 2.0, there’s another post for Museum Mashups. In case you’re wondering, the colorful image of the Pacific Ocean on the left comes from NASA’s SeaWIFS and MODIS/Aqua missions. The bright colors show chlorophyll concentrations in the water. Workshop Description Originally developed as tool to help scientists share information,…
Today I’m conducting two half-day workshops at the Museums and the Web Conference in San Francisco. This blog post contains the workshop description and the course materials for Museum Mashups, there’s another post for Real Science 2.0: Interacting with Scientific Imagery and Live Data. The image on left is a termite “catherdral” mound, an example of the theory of emergence in nature. I decided to use this image after rading Alex Iskold’s article on Yahoo! Pipes, where he talks about emergence (part of…
Three weeks from today the ExhibitFiles website will be publicly available. This National Science Foundation-sponsored Website will allow exhibit developers to “connect with colleagues, find out about exhibits, and share experiences.” For over a year now we’ve been working with our partners at the Association of Science-Technology Centers and Independent Exhibitions to design this community site. We’ve had a great group of advisors and we’ve also received helpful comments through the ExhibitFiles Development blog. The site is being…
