The Latest from the Blog

Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere

Our paper summarizing the findings from the first museum blog survey is now available on the Museums and the Web 2007 website. Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum and I conducted the survey back in December. For our presentation at the conference in San Francisco, we’ll discuss what these results mean and take another look at museum blogs to see how things have changed even over the last few months. For those of you attending, we’ll also be having a meet up of…

Museums and the Web: San Francisco

This year’s Museums and the Web conference will be held in San Francisco from April 11th to the 14th. I’ll be conducting two half-day workshops, Museum Mashups and Real Science 2.0 on the first day of the conference. I’ll share some of the materials from those workshops on this blog following the conference. Also, I’ll be presenting The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. with Catherine Baudoin from the Maxwell Museum and Beth Maloney who was the primary writer and…

The complete list of NASA Podcasts

Back in 2005, we developed a video podcast for NASA’s Sun-Earth Education Forum (see Traditions of the Sun). Soon after we were invited to became part of listserv which included everyone who podcasts at NASA. A master list of all NASA podcasts has been compiled and floating around the group for sometime now but it has ever been published. I asked Bryan Walls who administers the group if we could publish it, knowing it would be of interest to some of you. Here’s what…

The Museum Room, Apple iPod Tour

Apple’s latest iPod Tour focuses on museums and features SFMoMA’s Artcasts, Chateau de Versailles, and the Miami Metrozoo. It’s nice to see Apple featuring these museum podcasts, although I was a bit disappointed when I visited The Museum Room in the iTunes store to see all of the offerings. There are some excellent podcasts here from museums like the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate, Hirshorn Museum, but there are only twenty, and none of them are from science museums. Apple, did you really…

The Tech Museum on YouTube

Late last Fall we posted of number video clips we developed with The Tech Museum of Innovation up on YouTube. Admittedly, it was an afterthought, as we originally began work with the Tech on the Understanding Genetics website years before YouTube was much of a force. The video clips in question, came from interviews I conducted at the Future of Science Conference in Venice back in September. The interviews were with an amazing group; Daniel Dennett, Peter Atkins, Marc Hauser, and Ian…

New and improved Museum Blogs directory

We finally carved out the time to make some very necessary changes to the Museum Blogs directory and aggregator. The site is a customized WordPress application with quite a bit of additional coding to make it all work. We’ve added pagination, integrated a Google Co-op search, and we have greatly improved the “auto aggregator.” The site now can handle RSS 1.0 and 2.0, along with Atom syndication. This major improvement in syndication has increased the number of posts in the site, there are…

Mashup of the Day and other thoughts

KQED Quest is the Mashup of the Day on the Programmable Web site, the authoritative directory of mashups and Web 2.0 APIs (application programming interface). Two other Ideum design sites appear in the directory as well: The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. and Recycle Torrance. As the Programmable Web shows, we are not alone in experimenting with mashups, the number continues to rise and recently surpassed 1,500 mashups. While we’re on the topic, a…

Museum Blogs – Google Co-op Search Engine

With 113 museum blogs now listed in the MuseumBlogs directory we’ve thinking about the next steps for the site. It is in need of a redesign to accomodate the large number of blogs that have been added recently, there were only around 30 when it launched early last summer. Since this is an “unfunded” project, we don’t always the time we’d like to work on it. As part of redesign, a simple tool we’ve been experimenting with is Google Custom Search Engines, known as…

Online video editors and a quick survey of Web 2.0 video sites

Earlier in the month, we launched The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr., one of the activities included was the Propaganda Filmmaker. This custom version of our own experimental online Flash video editor, allows visitors to make their own short, 40 second films, which can then be embedded or emailed. Some work on the server-side keeps track of the latest videos and the top rated ones. It is an interesting activity in that the visitor is given creative control and can…

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