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 Tattersall.
The original plan was to post them on the Understanding Genetics site in a Flash video player and then to Podcast them through the website and iTunes. After seeing Ontario Science Centre’s early efforts on YouTube we decided to spend a couple extra hours uploading the video clips to our own channel on the site. Three months later, it is nice to see that some of the Future of Science clips have over 1,000 views. Atleast one has a long discussion associated with it and all 26 clips have at least one rating and a minimum of 100 views. While these are modest numbers, still a few thousand Web visitors who likely would not have seen these interviews on The Tech Museum site or on iTunes saw them on YouTube. (The Understanding Genetics’s website itself receives around 600,000 unique visitors a year.)
We’ll continue to experiment and watch as museums move forward in their efforts to colonize social websites, it seems like a simple and natural extension for projects like Understanding Genetics to expand their reach.
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 now nearly 10,000. That means there are nearly 10,000 links to other museum blogs! We hope that this helps improve the authority of the all of the 118 blogs in the site. Afterall, that’s why we built the directory last May.
While we’re on the topic, a few thoughts to share about mashup design. What draws us to mashups is the ability rapidly and cost effectively develop complex user-experiences. A few years ago we developed a custom mapping program in Adobe Flash for the Traditions of the Sun: Chaco Culture website, developing this as a mashup would have saved hundreds of hours in programming time. (The mashup services were simply not available when we created the site.) In addition, using a well-known service such as Google Maps also means that users are more likely to be familiar with them. Visitors know how to pan and zoom, change from map to satellite view, and so on. Not having to develop an entire user-interface from scratch is a major plus. Again, reducing further development time.
With sites like Flickr, the attraction is the ability to store, manage and share content. For the American Image project, having a ready-made database with a built in content-management system, allowed us to focus on other aspects of the project. The fact that we could also connect with the Flickr community has turned out to be a factor in the success of the project. So far, more people have seen John Collier Jr.’s work on Flickr then on the American Image site itself.
While this all is very positive, there are some drawbacks. You have to include the service site’s branding, there is a bit of learning curve in mashup development at first, and there can be technical limitations and obstacles in using an API as opposed to developing something from scratch. One major issue we ran into repeatedly with the KQED Quest mashups was Javascript implementation across various browsers: IE 6 and 7 and Apple’s Safari were all problematic at different times.
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 Google Co-op (Beta, of course).
We’ve created a museum blog co-op that does a pretty good job of searching the 113 blogs listed in the directory. You can try it out right here. (Updated: 2-5-07)
There is also a page for Museum Blogs on Google itself. This co-op doesn’t allow other contributors (although you can always add your site to Museum Blogs). Seems like there’s a lot of potential here for museums and others. If you want to add the code to search Museums Blogs from your own, it’s below.
