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…
Last year, we designed a site for the Nevada Clean Energy Coalition to assist their efforts to stop the construction of a coal burning power plant. Late last week, we learned in the Reno Gazette Journal that Sempra Energy has halted work on its federally required environmental study. Sempra spokesman Doug Kline in San Diego said the company is holding back on all of the permits while “reconfiguring the project design, based on talks with potential partners and potential customers.” Apparently, the potential…
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…
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…
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…
Our latest widget is now available in Yahoo! Widget Gallery. This one displays images from the National Science Foundation’s Multimedia Gallery. The gallery is updated fairly often and the images are a compelling mix of science-related photographs and visualizations. We’re still working on Mac OS X Desktop versions of some of our widgets, the construction is bit more complex than those of the Yahoo!/Konfabulator variety. If you’re interested learning more about Widgets, Kevin Silver here at Ideum wrote an excellent piece entitled,…
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…
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.
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…
