The Latest from the Blog

National Digital Forum: Day 2 – Mobile Guide Systems…

The second session on day 2 at the National Digital Forum here in Wellington, NZ focused mostly on the use of portable devices in museums. A highlight was the presentation by Hiroyuki Arita-Kikutani from the National Science Museum, Tokyo. His presentation was entitled, Mobile guide systems in museums through the use of portable game devices. Developed as part of the “e-Japan Strategy,” he discussed a trial using PlayStation Portable (PSP) devices. Between PSP and Nintendo DS, there are over 4 million of…

National Digital Forum: Day 2 – Let’s see what happens if…

A packed day today at the National Digital Forum in Wellington, NZ. Here’s the first of probably a couple of posts as I’m going through my notes. This morning’s keynote was delivered by Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled, Let’s see what happens if … Experimenting with emerging technologies on the V&A website. Toby presented the story behind many of the innovative things the museum has been up to over the last few years. Perhaps the most compelling part of this…

National Digital Forum: Day 1

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is hosting the Digital Forum here in the capital city of Wellington. It’s a beautiful space, although honestly, I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to check out the exhibits (perhaps today). From what I’ve seen the museum contains a mix of art and artifacts with a focus of the taonga (“treasures” in the Maori language) of New Zealand. They also have a Kid’s Zone which contains hands-on exhibits and programs…

National Digital Forum: Wellington, New Zealand

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…

The New Web: Victoria, Canada

I’ve finally found the time to put together quick post about the course I taught last week at the University of Victoria up in British Columbia. The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World focused on Web 2.0 technologies and techniques and their potential uses in the museum world. While the heart of the week-long course was comprised of face-to-face discussions and small-group design “challenges,” we utilized a number of Web 2.0 technologies as well. Of course we had a blog…

Museum Blogs 5,000

The Museum Blogs directory reached a new milestone today there are now 5,000 “re-posts” on the site. 86 blogs are in the directory and they are being adding at a rate of just under 10 a month (100 by 2007?). On the Ideum blog we’ve just added a new blog roll of all of the sites from the Museumblogs directory (take a look at the left column under the list of Categories). We’ve imported an OPML file (which is a kind of XML…

Desktop Widgets on the Web

Recently, we tried our hand and developing a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, the Solar Viewer. We built the Yahoo! Widget version earlier in the year with some success–at least as far the number of downloads are concerned. Having developed now for two of the more popular widget platforms (we haven’t looked at Google Gadgets, Opera Widgets, or DesktopX, yet) there are few interesting sites in Dashboard and Yahoo! Widget world worth pointing out. These sites are great for finding new…

The Best of the Best Web 2.0 Sites

Real World Software Development has posted an enormous list of Web 2.0 sites, the Best of the Best Web 2.0 sites. All of these site are (of course) checked by the Web 2.0 validator. Which is one step above (or below?) the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator. The list is extensive, but surprisingly there’s no mention of LibraryThing, Shelfari (which we wrote about recently, Our new (Beta) bookshelf on Shelfari), and Whatsonmybookshelf. Also missing is BlueDot (social bookmarking),…

Latest Images of the Sun: Mac OS X Dashboard Widget

We’ve just finished developing version 1.0 of the Solar Viewer widget this time as a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. Earlier in the year we developed a Yahoo! widget version that works with both Mac and Windows, although you’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine to make it go. Both versions (Yahoo! and Mac Dashboard) show the latest images of the sun from NASA satellites and ground-based observatories. More information about the images and links to larger images are provided. We…

Ready to Start?
Contact Us.