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 their traditional role as arbiters of knowledge. Blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, wikis, open-source content management tools and more, collectively offer the promise of greater interaction and collaboration, both at the museum and on-line. Not since the invention of the Web and its subsequent development a multimedia platform have we seen such an exciting array of emerging technologies, yet few museums to date have taken up the tools and strategic advantages offered by what’s been dubbed Web 2.0. These advantages include the educational potential of constructivist learning models fostered by on-line collaboration and dialogue and ‘first mover’ advantage with funders and partners. Meanwhile, not to participate is to risk being left behind by a significant and growing segment of our visitors, and to have our mission and offerings defined by others in our absence, potentially to everyone’s detriment. In this paper, we argue that the strengths of museums such as authenticity, emotional engagement and repeat visitation, make them ideal catalysts for on-line communities; we examine some early experiments; we explore issues of quality and accuracy in visitor-created content; and we suggest models for the management and maintenance of on-line communities.

Perhaps the most interesting finding was just how far behind museums are when it comes to Web 2.0 technologies. This is especially true of science centers, there are literally just a couple of community sites and blogs (Ontario Science Centre’s RedShift Now and Science Museum of Minnesota’s Science Buzz). Being behind technologically, has consequences. As we state in the paper…

If you searched Google with the phrase “science museum blogâ€? (something you could expect a science museum visitor to do) in January 2006, the top result was a sign-up page for the Creation Science Museum newsletter. (http://creationscience.miricreation.com/ creationsciencemuseum)

The top ranking item in 2005? Answers in Genesis, Upholding the Authority of the Bible from the Very First Verse (http://www.answersingenesis.org/museum), home to the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, USA. Science blogs created by science museums are not what you find on these sites! If we do not define ourselves in this new medium, it will be done in our absence and quite possibly to our detriment – and the detriment of our visitors.

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, So You Want to Build a Yahoo! Widget.

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.â€?

In a more recent post, Carr looks at the widely reported article in Nature that suggests that Wikipedia was “roughly equivalent” in terms of accuracy with Britannica. Carr works hard to show that the 162 errors found in Wikipedia were much more egregious than the 123 found in Britannica. (There were about four inaccuracies per science entry in Wikipedia vs. three per entry in Britannica.) Additionally, he makes the argument that the survey “probably exaggerated Wikipedia’s overall quality considerably.”

While I certainly found the article interesting and can agree with Carr on many of the smaller points he makes, I think the larger point is lost. When I go to Wikipedia, I see an “editâ€? button on each entry I come across. That’s the beauty of Wikipedia, it is also a liability. I know because of that edit button that I need be careful of information that I find there. What was illuminating about the article in Nature was not that Wikipedia contains inaccuracies but rather that Encyclopedia Britannica contains so many. Perhaps we need to take a closer look at the “Cult of the Professional?â€?

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 easy way for you to create your own Social Web Apps.” What could be more Web 2.0 than that?

By the way, we’re always looking for interesting sites, ones that have compelling design or content, or some innovative use of technology. Also, we are currently conducting a survey of museum blogs and community sites. If you have any examples, please us know.

Yahoo! has just posted our new Widget, the Solar Viewer Mini. O.K., We know it is still a big widget, but compared to first Solar Viewer it is slimmer and who wants to see tiny images of the sun anyway. This version has “drawers” and scrollers to make it more compact. We’ve had nearly 2,000 downloads just today! Our previous solar viewer has over 38,000 downloads in a little over a month. We developed this widget for NASA’s Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum. Both widgets are based on the Flash-based Sun-Earth Viewer which Ideum also developed for NASA.

You’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine for Mac and PC to run this. We’re currently working on the Mac OS X Dashboard version of this same widget. We will let you know when that is available.

A New York Times Editorial has more on the the controversy surrounding the Bush administration’s alleged effort to silence NASA scientist Dr. James E. Hansen after he gave a lecture calling for quick reductions in greenhouse emissions.

Apparently, a twenty-four-year old presidential appointee who also lied about his credentials was the censor. According to the Times…

In this case, the censor was George Deutsch, a functionary in NASA’s public affairs office whose chief credential appears to have been his service with President Bush’s re-election campaign and inaugural committee. On his résumé, Mr. Deutsch claimed a 2003 bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas A&M, but the university, alerted by a blogger, said that was not true. Mr. Deutsch has now resigned.

The shocker was not NASA’s failure to vet Mr. Deutsch’s credentials, but that this young politico with no qualifications was able to impose his ideology on other agency employees. At one point, he told a Web designer to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang.

As this story breaks, Time Magazine has as their cover story Is America Flunking Science? Certainly, having ideology stifle debate and the free flow ideas isn’t helpful. Time takes the issue head on with the article,The Political Science Test.

Update (2/11/06): There is an interesting follow up article in the Washington Post here.

A bit of shameless promotion here for a course I will be teaching for the Cultural Resource Management Program at University of Victoria. It is a one-week intensive course looking at new and emerging technologies (a.k.a. The Web 2.0) and their applications for museums. It will be held the first week of June 2006.

I taught a Web 1.0 version of this course a few times in 2002-2004, it always had a great mix of people from museums large and small. I know it sounds like a cliché but I always learn a lot teaching these courses. A PDF flyer is here and more information about the Cultural Resource Management Program at UVIC and their other offerings is here.