The Association of Science-Technology Center’s (ASTC) annual conference starts this weekend, hosted by the Louisville Science Center (pictured right). This year I’m co-presenting, The Next Wave: Emerging Internet Technologies at Museums with Bryan Kennedy, Science Buzz (Science Museum of Minnesota) and Kevin von Appen, RedShift Now (Ontario Science Center). We all collaborated at the Museums and Web conference back in March where we presented the paper, Community Sites & Emerging Socialable Technologies.

While some of the topics are the same, there are new findings and ideas to report. Back in March there were only around 30 museum blogs, now there are 80 at last count in the Museum Blogs directory. While that is still not a lot of sites, it does equal about a half-dozen new museum blogs a month.

One area that we’ll spend more time talking about at the ASTC Conference is the concept of museum’s entering (colonizing?) existing social spaces. This week a came across a few posts from Zeke’s Gallery on Art Museums on Flickr and Art Museums on MySpace. At the same time I learned about Ontario Science Center posting videos on YouTube. While those of you outside of the museum world are wondering what’s the big deal. It is still rather unusual for a museum to establish a presence in these spaces, the vast majority of their web efforts our focused on their own sites. Trust continues to be an obstacle.

We’ll discuss the concept of radical trust. This was a hot topic first in the Library 2.0 world, and later in our own museum blogosphere (Fresh + New explored, Radical trust & Web 2.0 as well). Finally, it will be good to hear the latest on Science Buzz and RedShift Now they remain two of the more interesting Web 2.0 examples in the science museum field.

We’ve set up a Flickr pool for the conference so if you’re attending please join up. If you’re not, you can still check out the pool at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/astc2006

Shelfari (Beta, of course) is “a virtual shelf to show your books” and “connect with your friends.” It’s an interesting concept and parts of it are well done, although some the limitations in organizing your shelf became apparent soon after I began to add books. It would be great to be able to reorder, or otherwise create categories (in ways other than using opinions or star ratings), but perhaps this is in the works as this site only launched this month.

Our shelf is at: http://www.shelfari.com/Ideum. For now, the books included are those that I thought would be useful for course I’m teaching at UVIC next month (The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World). I haven’t added much to our shelf in the way of tags or opinions to any of the books in the collection, but it’s a start. It will be interesting to see how things develop with Shelfari and with its closest competitor, the more established LibraryThing.

As the Web has evolved, so has our portfolio. I’ve always believed that a strong portfolio site not only demonstrates our capabilities, but also reflects our approach towards design and technology.

This is our fifth portfolio site in less than seven years and while it is never easy to find the time to redesign, we’ve always managed to squeeze it in between projects. There were several motivating factors at play here for this redesign.

First, as screen size has grown over the last few years our portfolio was looking increasingly small on the screen. Currently, 6 in 10 monitors are at 1024×768 pixels only about 17% use 800×600. This is according to designer Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox July 2006.

A larger size portfolio means larger slides and video. This is particularly important for the electronic exhibits that we create, that are not viewable on the Web. (For example, Tour the Solar System or Clean Power: The Promise of Fuel Cells are on the museum floor only.) Nielsen’s advice was to optimize the design for 1024×768 and then create a “liquid” design that would continuously resize based on a range of browser window sizes. We took a slightly different approach. The Ideum portfolio automatically detects browser window size and provides the option (top right under About and Contact) for the visitor to resize if they wish. Like Neilsen, we agree you can’t ignore 17% of your audience.

Another consideration was accessibility. While Adobe Flash has made strides in accessibility with each new version, HTML is simply more accessible. A screen reader or portable device can more easily access the information on our new site. (By the way, if you’re interested in accessibility issues in Adobe Products, check out their Accessibility blog).

When we launched our blog in January of this year, we quickly saw our page views jump in our Google Analytics and we watched them rise 1,500% according to Alexa.com. While there were certainly more pages generated, we noticed an improvement in the number of visitors site-wide.

Our all-Flash portfolio was basically a black box. Individual project pages couldn’t be indexed by search engines or even bookmarked by interested visitors. Also, browser navigation was problematic. For example, the back button would take visitors out of our portfolio. Don’t get me wrong, Flash is still an amazing tool, particularly for online and electronic exhibits. However, developments in AJAX and other Web technologies and the issues I’ve described make Flash less appealing in certain settings. Take a look at AJAX vs. Flash on the dotone site to learn more about this ongoing competition.

Our experience with blogging and other “Web 2.0″ technologies and approaches convinced us that a redesign was necessarily, not only improve the user-experience, but also to heighten our visibility. You’ll notice that we’ve added new features allowing visitors to email individual project pages and to post them to del.icio.us or My Yahoo!.

The structure of the main portfolio page is much the same. We kept the matrix of subjects (Art, History, Science, etc.) and media types (DVD/CD, exhibit, etc.) from the Flash version. It helps users easily find projects while showing the range of work that we’re capable of doing as well as the topic we explore (without having to say, “we do x, y, and z…”).

Finally, the new portolio was developed in Ruby on Rails and uses our own custom content management system (CMS). James here at Ideum will do a post later on the back-end of the site and our new CMS. Until then, we hope you enjoy the new portfolio. Let us know what you think.

We’ve just posted two new postions on Craigslist (Santa Fe & ABQ). We’re looking for yet another programmer/developer to help with Web and exhibit projects. As our portfolio Flash exhibits to mash ups to more traditional Web design. We’re also looking for a studio assistant to help us with support for our creative projects as well organizational task. demonstrates we do quite a range of development from

If you’re interested, please view the job descriptions (Programmer/Developer & Studio Assistant) on Craigslist and apply through the email address listed there.(We’re no longer accepting applications for these positions, 11-07-06)

This Sunday the third Mayan World Alive! event will be held, this time in San Rafael, California at the Pickleweed Community Center. The event is free. (The previous two openings were held at the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco and the Governor’s palace in Merida, Mexico). This cultural event and exhibit will feature activities, music, dancing and a photographic exhibit showing some of the photographs we took for the Traditions of the Sun project last year. NASA’s website has more on the traveling photo exhibit.

Sunrise at Dzibilchaltun in the northen Yucatan. The building is known as the Sun Temple or the House of the Seven Dolls. This Late Classic building functioned as an observatory by marking the equinoxes, as well as the summer and winter solstices.

The Caracol, or Observatory at Chichen Itza served as an observatory for gathering astronomical data about the sun, moon, and planet Venus. Having the opportunity to shoot aerial photos was one of the highlights of the project. There is a slideshow with more aerial photograhs.

The Great Palace of Sayil is a beautiful and often overlooked struture. Sayil is located just a few kilometers from the more famous site of Uxmal.

El Castillo, or Castle, is the central pyramid of Chichen Itza. Notice the shadow on the right side of the pyramid. This appears as a great serpent which descends the staircase throughout the afternoon hours during the equinox. This photograph was taken in Spring of 2005. As you can see, huge crowds come to witness the event.