I just returned from Washington D.C. where I was involved in a series of meetings at the Association of Science-Technology Centers. In one of the meetings, I had an opportunity to meet David Herring from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He helps coordinate NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

Launched in 1998, the Earth Observatory has been one of the best spots on the Internet for learning about our planet’s dynamic systems. The site is nominated (again) for a Webby Award as Best Education Site and deservedly so. (You can vote here.)

The Earth of Observatory has been a source of inspiration, and a model that we’ve looked at in developing sites that utilize actual scientific data. In the past, Ideum has developed sites that present scientific data such as: Solar Max (2001), The Global Climate Change Research Explorer (2003), the Sun-Earth Media Viewer (2004), among others. So, it was great to meet someone else who has worked on sites with a similar focus.

In the meeting, David previewed NEO, which stand for NASA Earth Observations. The site provides a Flash 8 pan and zoom interface and will eventually provide access to a wealth of full-resolution earth imagery. At the moment, the Ocean section has the most in the way of data-sets. In NEO, the images are available in multiple formats and at the same resolution that NASA scientists use for research. This great for those of us who depend on high-quality, high-resolution images for exhibit development.

The site is beta, a bit rough around the edges, and not publicly linked, but David was nice enough to give us permission to write about it. Along with its beta status, NEO is gathering information through a survey. So if you do check it out, give them a bit of feedback. Ok?

New proposed legislation that would abandon Network Neutrality could impact all of us. Learn how you can do your part to Save the Internet.

Internet Freedom is under attack. Congress is pushing a law that would abandon Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most.

Check out the site, learn more about the issue, see where your representative stands, and send a message to congress.

Update: TPM Cafe has a related article, Congress is Giving Away the Internet and You Won’t Like Who Get’s It.

Last week I was in Tucson, Arizona as part of the Astronomy from the Ground Up initiative. This NSF-sponsored project involves the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Association of Science-Technology Centers, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. Ideum is working with all of the partners to help build an online community and create some online materials and experiences for informal educators. We spent part of the day Thursday trying out some outdoor astronomy activities at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

My time was somewhat limited, but I did get a chance to look around the museum and take some pictures. The place is certainly unique. It touts itself as a zoo, natural history museum and botanical garden, and it does do a pretty good job teaching visitors about the natural wonders of this part of the world. The museum is located on 98 acres in the hills just outside of Tucson.

The desert was in bloom when we were there or perhaps just past, but regardless the demonstration gardens were absolutely beautiful.

The museum was quite crowded the day we were there. An employee told me it was the end of the busy season. It was about 90° F the day we visited, so it is easy to see why attendance in the summer might be down. According to their FAQ the highest recorded temperature at the museum was 117° F.

The museum recommends about 2 to 3 hours to look around, unfortunately I was only able to spend about half that amount of time exploring. I walked through some of various demonstration gardens. In the mountain woodlands area, they have a mountain lion “exhibit.” While, I must admit I have mixed emotions when I see large animals in captivity, it was still quite fascinating to be able to see this amazing cat so close.

In the desert grasslands area I got to check out some Black-tailed Prairie Dogs, very cool.

The museum is full of suprises they have a mineral gallery, a collection of reptiles and invertebrates, an impressive hummingbird aviary, and much more. All in all it was a nice mix of live animals, beautiful demonstration gardens, and other types of exhibits. It was a great, brief introduction to the Sonoran Desert.

A friend pointed out an interesting post on Fresh + New about the Ontario Science Centre’s weekly podcasts on their Redshift Now site. The post explores the numbers (how many downloads) and where visitors are picking up episodes (iTunes and elsewhere). (I’ll try to see about collecting and sharing some of the number’s from our own Vodcasting efforts.)

Fresh + New goes on to examine aggregation, and asks whether we should replace our manual efforts with some sort of an automated one…

So could/should we individually, or collectively build a ‘Google News’ of museums? Is this even possible?

This is not completely unrelated to the converstation that’s been happening at the Walker Art Center, So what is a “blog carnival”? While on the Walker blog we are discussing more “manual” solutions, I recently toyed with the idea that we might be able to create some sort of a combined RSS Feed.

In other blogs…

Museum Madness blogs about the Walker? The new addition to the Walker Art Center that is. While Loreto Martin fills us in on Warhblog (I blogged Andy Warhol).

Eye Level takes a look at photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, it includes a podcast of a recent lecture. TechStyle reports on the opening of the Pixar Exhibition at the Science Museum (London).

MODE continues to post the Museum Photo of the Week, this one from WA Medical Museum. You can even submit your own photos. Minnesota Science Center’s Science Buzz, Buzz Blog looks the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft.

Assembly let’s us in on a secret. Museum Pro is still all new and coming soon, and finally Mario Bucolo has started an old fashioned Webring.

If that wasn’t enough, the Museum Blog Round Up: 2 and the original Museum Blog Round Up are still available.

A List Apart recently published this intersting article, Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters, on the importance of user identity in an online community. The article surveys various methodologies from total anonymity to robust mebership systems. John M. Grohol, the author, ends the discussion with six recommendations on how to create a better community through memership. This was a very timely read for me, because we are in the beginning stages of designing an online community for a project we’re working on.

It seems more and more the projects that we’re involved in, involve RSS. For those you not familiar take a look at What is RSS and Why Should I Care, a very straight-forward article on Search Engine Watch.

First off, RSS feeds continue to multiply: RSS Feeds.com has about 120,000 listed which Feedburner claims over 250,000, but since nearly every blog has an associated RSS feed (or multiple ones), there are literally tens-of-millions of feeds (Technorati claims it has over 33 million blogs in its search engine).

Of course there is a blog dedicated to everything RSS, but what really caught my attention was the way in which a few sites are gathering, mixing, and filtering RSS feeds.

FeedRinse – Is an easy way to “filter” RSS streams. As they claim it, “…lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren’t interested in. It’s like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions.”

RSS Mix – Allows you mix RSS feeds and create new ones! For example, here’s an HTML page that was created from a mix of four blogs some of which I cited in our Museum Blog Round Up 2. The four sites I threw into this feed are the Ideum blog, Hanging Together, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and The Curator’s Egg.

If you’re looking for more on RSS, Tech Crunch has a recent article on The State of Online Feed Readers with a comparison of Bloglines, feedlounge, Google Reader, and News Gator, among others.

Just last week Apple celebrated its 30th anniversary. I’ve been an avid user since the days of the Apple IIe and I’ve worked my way through dozens of Apple computers, including an Outbound, Apple notebook clone! (The makers were sued by Apple and put out of business.)

Marking the anniversary, a friend sent along a couple of quizzes which test your Apple knowledge: Apple@30 trivia (hard) and How much do you know about Apple (easy).

Since the Apple began shipping computers with Intel chips earlier in the year, it was just a matter of time before someone got Windows XP running on a Mac. Just today I found out that OnMac.net has released “Bootloader 0.1” which lets you load Windows XP on an Intel Mac. The next 30 years should be just as interesting.

Update (4-5-06): Apple has just introduced their own Public Beta Software which allows Intel Macs to Run Windows XP. It’s called Boot Camp.