We’re happy to announce that museumblogs.org is up and running. Over the last couple of months, off and on, we’ve been working on putting the site together. The original idea came from our Survey of Museum Blogs, the follow Up, and numerous conversations and ideas that came out of the Museums and Web conference. (We posted some of those ideas here, the Walker’s New Media Initiatives Blog posted about it here with numerous comments.)

The Welcome post on museumblogs.org explains more, but briefly, the idea behind Museum Blogs create an open space that brings together the museum blogosphere, while making all of our efforts more visible.

Take a look around and please tell us what you think. We’re looking for people who might be interested in participating on the museumblog.org site, by blogging or adding/editing sites in the directory. Just let us know.

As I mentioned in our last post, a review on the book The Weather Makers, Ideum has signed up with our electricity provider to receive 90% (the maximum) of our power from renewable wind. The Weather Makers points out that power plants, coal burning ones especially, contribute significantly to global warming. This was not news to us, as we’ve been involved in helping to stop the development of a coal burning power plant in Nevada.

Here in New Mexico, we have a voluntary program called Sky Blue from our local power company PNM which uses wind energy. The power comes from a wind farm called the New Mexico Wind Energy Center located in the eastern part of the state. Electricity for 94,000 average-sized New Mexico homes is generated at this one farm with 136 turbines. The farm provides about 8% of PNM’s total power to the state. With so much open land, frequently windy conditions, and an average of six days of sunshine out of every seven, one has to wonder why we don’t generate more renewable energy in our state.

Unfortunately, New Mexico still receives a lot of its power from coal. Our state trails only Wyoming, North Dakota, and Indiana in our CO2 emissions per-kilowatt hour at least according to the Department of Energy’s Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Program page. Our “emissions factor” is 2.02 lbs of CO2 per-kilowatt hour.

By switching the Ideum studio over to 90% wind power, we are saving 1,212 lbs of CO2 per-month (based on 600kWh), while adding a modest $10 per-month to our electricity bill. We’re happy to pay, to do something to help reduce CO2 emissions (not to mention other forms of pollution).

If you’re interested in finding out about similar programs your state, visit the Department of Energy’s Green Power Markets Program By State web page. To learn more about protecting the Interior West, please check out the Western Resource Advocates website.

I just finished reading Tim Flannery’s excellent book, The Weather Makers. For those of you not familiar with Tim Flannery he’s a scientist, conservationist, a writer, and is the director of the South Australian Museum. A very busy guy. I read one of his earlier books, the Future Eaters, a number of years ago while in Australia and really enjoyed it.

The Weather Makers outlines the history of climate change focusing on many high-profile weather events such as powerful hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the first South Atlantic hurricane, and the hottest European summer ever recorded. He also looks at the strengthening El Niño weather pattern and warns of that it could become “semi-permanent” bringing increased rainfull across to Peru and southeastern US, with drought like conditions to places like Indonesia and here in the American Southwest.

The science of global warming is presented in an understandable but far from simplistic way, and several possible future scenarios are examined. Most of them are rather depressing and some are quite frightening. But rather than leaving the reader distressed, a passionate call to action closes the book on a high note. Flannery suggests things that all of us can easily do, such as contacting the local power company and signing up for special programs that provide electricity from renewable sources. (The U.S. Department of Energy has a listing of Green Power Markets.) Ideum has signed up for such a program, more on that in another post.

This week we were contacted by Governor Pataki’s office about using graphics Ideum developed with California Science Center for a major speech yesterday. The graphics were developed for an interactive exhibit called Alternative Fuels which is in California Science Center’s Transportation Gallery. The exhibit is one of four that we developed with the museum in 2004.

Although personally we tend to gravitate to other side of the aisle, it is nice to see our graphics being used for a good cause. The Governor is looking to end “exclusivity” contracts between distributors and service stations that prohibit the sale of renewable fuels in the state. The press release on the Governor’s site explains more.

Update: I finally got around to posting a picture of the actual exhibit. It uses four pump handles that visitors use answer questions and learn about four alternative fuels. The look we developed for the screens was used by California Science Center for the exhibit graphics as well.

The exhibit displays wide-screen video from DVD. An industrial Pioneer DVD-V7400 is used along with a custom controller (that talks to the RS232C connection), so that the pump handles send commands to the DVD player. The exhibit is in English and Spanish language (Combustibles Alternativos)! The bright push-button to the right of the screen toggles the exhibit from language to language.

It’s been a little less than a month since our last Museum Blog Round Up and there’s a lot to report.

First, the big news is that Musematic has joined the ever growing museum blogosphere. “An intrepid cast of experts from the Museum Computer Network and AAM’s Media & Technology Committee” are posting on a variety of museum related topics.

We’re a bit late in presenting this news, apparently they launched on the date of our last round up, April 13th. Musematic’s first post, Museum Blogging explains, “One of the things we’ll be trying to do at MuseMatic is introduce you to the growing museum blogosphere.” That’s certainly welcomed, as our museum blog community needs to be more interconnected and have better authority.

Along those same lines, it’s nice to see the Museums Blog Webring grow. There are now 16 sites participating. We hope to have another way for museum blogs to increase their visibility, more on that later in the month.

In other blogs…

Science Buzz tells us about a 10,000 year clock that ticks once a year.

“Is photography a declining art form?” MODE asks the question in their post, The Death of Photography?

Eye Level posts, Meet Me at Midnight, a new art game for kids. Comments from the mysterious, L.G. (a 9 year old beta tester) explains more.

The Pulitzer points us to Conference Blogging for AAM. We especially liked seeing that the Boston Globe’s The Exhibitionist was blogging about the Invasion of the Museum People, at AAM, the “Party Edition.” Apparently, “librarians are heavy drinkers”?

ArtLook points us to Netcocktail :: Get Color and tells us about two new art blogs, the Art Guide Blog and a blog by artist David Black.

Are North American museums too expensive? You can vote in a poll at Museum madness.

The Walker’s New Media Initiatives Blog looks at Hacking the iPod for audio tours and tells us why the Graphic Interchange Format is back in vogue.

Farther down memory lane…

TechStyle takes us back to the 70′s, the days of the Radio Shack TRS80 Model 1 computer, we agree, This Guy Rocks. We’ll leave it at that.