At next week’s Museums and the Web Conference the theme is the Web 2.0. From the opening plenary to the closing, everyone is talking about it. The closing plenary is even called Museum 2.0 (which is the second time I’ve seen this term, ).

I thought it might be interesting to chart the term “Web 2.0″ in Technorati. Since February 1st, there have been roughly average of 1,000 posts with the term Web 2.0 compared to about 100 in March of last year. Whether we like the term or not, it has come to represent the lastest wave in development on the Web. Along with the chart, check out this list of All things Web 2.0. You’ll find sites like Bryght, Phrasr, Reevoo, Plazes, and a whoyl groop of Websites with straynge Web 2.0 namz.

Posts that contain Web 2.0 per day for the last 360 days.

A friend pointed out an article in the Washington Post about The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum entitled, A Curate-Your-Own Museum Web Site.

The so-called “online national design museum” promises to open the museum and its vast collection to visitors anywhere in the world. What’s more, if development can keep up with vision, the site will turn museumgoers into participants in a bold cultural experiment.

Interactivity is the key.

Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Thompson describes “an open theater for ideas.” And John Maeda, a digital guru at MIT and a trustee, talks of a “new paradigm” for museums.

They’re right. But here’s the catch: The traditional museum autocracy will have to accommodate democracy.

The article goes on to explore the issue of the quality of the “visitor created” information (among other things). Obviously, this is a key issue for all of us in the museum world, as our respective institutions (or the ones we’re working for) view themselves as authoritative sources of information.

I for one, think that museum’s should trust their visitor’s enough to not only provide them with place to socialize–but also to understand that visitors can differentiate between information presented by the museum itself and visitor posted comments.

Anyway, check it out. The article also references the Smithonian’s EyeLevel blog and the Walker Art Center’s Blog.

Last week, I attended a roundtable discussion called “E-Learning in Museums” held by the Canadian Heritage Information Network in Ottawa. One of the other speakers, George Siemens gave an interesting presentation entitled, Connectivism: Museums as Learning Ecologies. For those of you in the museum field and in education, George’s blog elearnspace is a great resource, dating back to June 2002, practically ancient history as far as blogs are concerned. He also maintains a site on Connectivism, so if you’re interested in this learning theory, it’s the place to go.

My earlier post with a link to my presentation, Museums and the Web 2.0 at the CHIN roundtable is here.

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 have caught somewhere around three-quarters of the museum and museum-related blogs that are out there. (Of course there are probably still others.) A number of the blogs we missed were either new with February and March starts, or we simply didn’t find them through any of the search engines or other museums sites we surveyed.

Museums blogs and blogs by museums professionals are simply not easy to find, which might help explain why our survey could miss so many sites, and perhaps why the survey itself has garnered so much interest.

As probably most of you know, blogs become more visible–that is they gain “more authority” in blog search engines like Technorati by being linked to. (Most traditional search engines also use “popularity” as a way to rank results, too.) Since most museum blogs are new they don’t tend to have much “authority.”

As a group, we (museum blogs) could do a better job of linking to each other more often, and paying more attention to each other’s efforts. Our blog is going to start right here, right now.

Below is a complete list of links to the museum blogs found in the survey including those we missed. Please feel free to cut and paste this list (not just cite the posting) and we’ll all gain “authority.”

We intend to update the survey soon, adding all of the additional information for the new sites and revising the summary & methodology and the conclusion. This probably won’t happen until next month at the earliest. Until then, here’s the current list…

Blogs not included in the original survey
Exhibit Commons
NYC Museum Education Roundtable
Loreto Martin
Hamilton (Canada) Museum Educators Group
Audience Research
Portable Antiquities Blog
Museum Connect
Museum Madness
Modern Art Notes

Art Museums
Tacoma Art Museum Docents Blog
Goldwell Open Air Museum Blog
Walker Blogs (6 blogs)
Bronx Mus(eum)ings
NCMA Blog
Art @ the Katzen
Contemporary-Pulitzer Blog
Eye Level

Children’s Museums
The Children’s Museum Blog

History Museums
Port Moody Station Museum Blog
Dallas History Forum

Science Museums
RedShift Now
Science Buzz

About Museums
Museum Guru
Museum People’s Journal
TechStyle
Assembly
Hanging Together
The Curator’s Egg
Museums and the Web
Museum Photographers Blog
Mode
Skillful Minds
Museum Pro
Ideum Blog
Mario Bucolo Museums Blog

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 customers in California have no appetite for “dirty energy” produced by coal burning power plants.

Kline said new regulations coming in California to forbid importing coal-fired power is the biggest reason for changing the plant design. The policy forbids investor-owned utilities from signing long-term contracts for power that pollutes more than natural-gas fired plants.

The article goes on to say that the study has been halted for 3 to 6 months. Personally, we hope this is the end of this project which if built would put tons of toxins into the air, draw billions of gallons of ground water each year (yes, billions), and have a life-span of over fifty years. Wouldn’t it be something if energy companies actually innovated and used some of the viable alternative energies that exist? Shouldn’t America’s energy companies be developing the technologies for the 21st century, rather than using those from the 19th?

While we’re optimistic about this new development, the fight is not over. If you’d like to sign the petition or donate to the Nevada Clean Energy Coalition, please do so.

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 it comes to
blogging and developing community-based sites. While
conducting research for various papers and presentations,
we couldn’t find a single source anywhere that contained
all of this information.

A number of sites included here were quite helpful in
pointing us to additional museum blogs and sites. In
particular, the Walker New Media Initiatives Blog (one
of six that the Walker Art Center Hosts) and Mario Bucolo
Museums Blog, were great sources. To a certain extent
these two very different blogs are representative of
what we found. The Walker Blog is over a year old, is
made up of six separate blogs, has multiple contributors,
and is sanctioned by a museum. Mario Bucolo’s blog is
just two months old and is a personal blog focusing on
museums. As you’ll see, the sites listed here are quite
diverse in how they operate and who they serve.

In terms of sheer numbers, museums have been slow to
develop blogs and community sites. Along with following
links from site to site, we searched various Web and
blog search engines. We found a total of 26 sites that
are either produced by museums for the public, or that
focus on what museums do. Technorati, a popular blog
search engine claims it searches 29.6 million blogs (as of
March 3, 2006). Apparently, museum blogs are literally
one-in-a-million.

The complete report is available below:
Museums: 2.0: A Survey of Museum Blogs & Community Sites

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 state of museum blogs and community sites. It also touches on some of the potential benefits and pitfalls these new technologies present. Many of the sources cited come from an article (to be published later this month) that I wrote for the National Association for Museum Exhibition’s (N.A.M.E.) Exhibitionist Magazine, as well as “Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies” co-written with Bryan Kennedy from Science Museum of Minnesota and Kevin von Appen from Ontario Science Centre. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Bryan and Kevin’s contributions to this presentation.

In addition, here at ideum, we’re working on a full survey of museum blogs and community-based sites. This report seems timely as one of the first museum blogs included in the report, the blog(s) at the Walker Art Center just a couple of weeks ago celebrated their one year anniversary. We hope to have this survey posted in just a couple of days. Stay tuned.