An article by David Ng, Now on exhibit, the blogger’s view is in today’s Sunday Los Angeles Times. The article mentions our own MuseumBlogs.org site and starts by looking broadly at the museum blogging community:

Within this small community, blogging can assume many guises. Some museums have dedicated staff who collectively write the blog entries and review visitor comments. Others entrust their blog to one person — an artist in residence or a curator — who uses the site as an official diary or journal.

Whatever form they take, museum blogs provide a space where ideas and opinions can circulate, more or less openly. But for the museums hosting them, that very openness can prove problematic. Unlike personal blogs, where anything goes, museums must weigh institutional objectives, such as promoting new exhibitions, against the populist pressures of the blogosphere — like being independent and snarky.

The article elaborates…

“…museum blogs suffer from a kind of split-personality syndrome. Are they civic forums or glorified marketing tools? Should they humanize the museum or enforce an authoritative distance? Perhaps all of the above. For museums, walking the thin blog line often amounts to an improvised balancing act.”

I think David is right about the improvisational nature of museum blogs. If you look at 61 blogs that are currently listed in the Museum Blogs directory, you’ll find a wide variety of approaches.

In some ways this is not surprising, as blogs are uniquely personal and museum culture can differ so dramatically from institution to institution. When I was at the Exploratorium in the mid-90s, I worked on the Science Learning Network project which originally involved five other science museums. I remember at the time being surprised at just how different these science museums were. If you add Natural History, Art Museums, and Cultural Institutions to this mix, then you really have very unique institutions, each with their own culture.

The diversity of approaches is multiplied again since about half of “museum blogs” are outside of any institution’s control. (This was something not mentioned in the article, too bad.) I think we’ll continue to see a multiplicity of approaches in museum blogs and one that will continue to evolve.

The article continued by looking at Science Museum of Minnesota’s Science Buzz and the charged discussions surrounding the Body Worlds exhibition. The article could have similarly looked at Ontario Science Centre’s RedShift Now which has hosted similarly controversial discussions.

David then posed the question, “SO is a blog still a blog when a museum is hovering over every word?” The answer seems to be yes. Sort of. The issue how much control and how “reactive” blogs can be with lots of museum oversight is explored.

Perhaps, the question should be, “What is your definition of a blog?” I think museums have to find their comfort level. Just because the popular definition of a blog is that they are spontaneous and informal in nature doesn’t mean museums have to use them in this way. Afterall, blogs are extremely flexible and the diversity found in the museum blogging community proves it. The article does seem to acknowledge this, as it looks at Eye Level, the Walker Blogs, “Concealed, Discovered, Revealed,” and a temporary blog (that I had never come across before!) from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles for the exhibition, Conversations.

All in all, the article does a good job exploring some of the issues concerning museum blogs. The timing seems right too, as we are in the midst of a very active period with nearly half of the museum blogs in existence having started this year (24 of the 61 blogs found in the museum blogs directory). Today, as we pass the 1,000 “posts” mark at Museum Blogs, we see yet another indication of just how active and visible the museum blog community has become.

Update (August 2, 2006): The Smithsonian’s Eye Level have written a short post on the article.

Museums and the New Web: The Promise of Social Technologies, an article that I wrote for the Association of Science – Technology Center’s Dimensions Magazine is now available online. It is part of an issue that is focused on Web 2.0 technologies (although the term “social technologies” was used instead.)

The article is similar in scope to two others that I worked on earlier this year: Museums and Web 2.0 for the Exhibitionist’s 25th anniversary issue and Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies, which I co-wrote with Kevin Von Appen from Ontario Science Centre and Bryan Kennedy from Science Museum of Minnesota. Articles by both Kevin and Byran also appear in this issue of Dimensions.

Kevin wrote a case study on the innovative RedShift Now website, while Bryan (along with Liza Pryor) described the process of developing Science Buzz, (which was “Best of the Web” at this year’s Museums and the Web Conference and deservedly so). There are some other very interesting articles as well, their titles are listed on the ASTC Dimension website. Unfortunately that’s all you find from these articles, you’ll have to order the issue to read them.

Museums and the New Web: The Promise of Social Technologies outlines the challenges and opportunities that the Web 2.0 presents for museums. I look at the museum blogosphere but also touch on other examples on found in the museum world. You can read the entire article here.

Over the last two months, we’ve been working on our first Google Map Mashup using the Google Maps API. Our client has given us permission to release the site to solicit feedback. The application is (of course) in “Beta.”

Where to Recycle in Torrance, California allows city residents to easily find recycling centers based on the items they wish to recycle. The concept is simple: the easier it is to recycle, the more recycling will happen.

We conducted a card sort and worked with the City to try to come up with logical categories for items. In addition, we added a “Find As You Type” search function.

An extensive administrative back-end allows the City to easily update locations and items (see image below). We’ve made extensive use of Ajax for both the front- and back-end of the application, making tasks simpler and improving usablity.

Where to Recycle will be part of a larger web presence focusing on recycling in the city, to be released in the Fall. In the meantime, please feel free to try out Where to Recycle, we’d appreciate any comments you might have.

Ideum will be hiring another programmer/developer in the next month or so.  The position is unique in that it includes on the job training in Ruby on Rails (among other things. As we continue to develop more and more ambitious web applications (like the ExhibitFiles) Ruby on Rails seems like the perfect fit. The job is being created as part of the New Mexico Job Training Incentive Program (New Mexico Business Weekly has the story on the Job Training awards.) The position has been filled as 8-28-06.

We just back from a quick weekend trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. For those of you who are familiar with Ideum, you probably know that we’ve been involved with the park over the last few years, and have developed the website and a book for NASA’s Traditions of the Sun project focusing on archaeoastronomy in Chaco Canyon.

This weekend we were in the park to help photograph a possible lunar alignment, but due to cloud cover, that didn’t quite turn out as we had hoped. However, I was lucky enough to be able to capture a beautiful double rainbow over the great house of Pueblo Bonito.

The park received a great deal of much needed rain just before we arrived and during our stay. It was great to see Chaco wash flowing although we had to cross it (waist deep!) to try for our lunar alignment shot. On the hike back that evening we were treated to an amazing show as an electrical storm raged off to the east.

I hope to post some more photos from Chaco Culture later this week, we’re off to San Francisco tonight. We’re going to photograph Scramble for Africa, an installation by Yinka Shonibare. It’s part of the Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). These photographs will be used in an interactive exhibit we’re developing with the museum.

For the last six months we’ve been working on an NSF-sponsored project called ExhibitFiles. It’s a three-year project and our mission is to “create the infrastructure for an active online community of informal science exhibit practitioners, including shared records of exhibition descriptions as a core feature.”

Wendy Pollock from Association of Science-Technology Centers is the principal investigator and Kathy McLean from Independent Exhibitions is a co-PI. Ideum’s role is help design, and build the site which will launch this winter. We’re building it in Ruby on Rails.

For now, we’ve created a development blog for the project partners to post evaluation and design documents and to solicit feedback from our core contributors and others in the field. It just went up yesterday but we’ve already posted a few things that might be of interest. The Welcome message describes the ExhibitFiles project in more depth, a User Needs Assessment Summary provides information about the potential users of the site, and our own Competitive Analysis document explores some of the potential features of the ExhibitFiles website.

There’s a great quote that was used in the original proposal and has helped guide our thinking…

“Learning is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when it becomes public and communal. Learning flourishes when we take what we think we know and offer it as community property among fellow learners so that it can be tested, examined, challenged, and improved…”
— Lee S. Shulman

Last month I had the good fortune of attending RailsConf 2006 in Chicago, the first official international conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails. For those of you who are out of the web development loop, Ruby on Rails (or simpy Rails) is an open source web application framework written in the Ruby programming language. In short, the Rails framework gives developers the power to create powerful web applications quickly and sustainably using much less code. What follows are some highlights from the conference.

WalkingBoss, a GPS/Google Maps/Flickr Mashup
Doug Fales gave a great presentation on WalkingBoss, a mashup that plots GPS data and photographs on a Google map. The basic process involves uploading a coordinate file generated by your GPS device, and then uploading photos or hooking it up to a Flickr photo collection. From the uploaded info, the site plots out a full course along the map with photo markers along the way.

This presentation was particularly intriguing to me because of its similarity to a project we’re currently working on at Ideum. Using PHP, we’ve built an Ajax-driven recycling site that plots recycling centers on a Google map. After seeing seeing this presentation, it became apparent that the site could be built more easily with Rails, making use of such features as built-in Ajax functionality, form validation, Scaffolding, and simple Google Maps integration using JavascriptGeneratorTemplates.

A few map-related links..
Google Maps Mania Blog
Google Maps Blog – Geocoding at last!
RailsConf Facebook
RecyleMap Torrance (coming soon)

BBC on Rails
Matt Biddulph, former Head of Plugging Things Into Other Things at the BBC’s Radio and Music Interactive, gave a great presentation on how they used Rails to create the BBC Programme Catalogue site, a searchable index containing details on nearly a million BBC radio & TV programs, dating back 75 years. His talk covered the ups and downs of converting the BBC’s database from an internal green-screen application into a publicly accessible Web 2.0 site using Rails. The resounding message of this talk was that Rails can easily be put to use for large-scale web applications.

Why the Lucky Stiff
A welcome performance was made at the otherwise exhaustingly technical conference by why the lucky stiff, a writer, musician, artist, and computer programmer best known for his work with the Ruby programming language. He graced the audience with a rousing show full of poetry, improvisational music (with three backup singerettes!), a smattering of hand-animated existentialist videos about computers and technology, and powerpoint slides of dysfunctional, redundant, and inherently illogical code snippets. A niche performer, you might say.

Oh yeah. He wrote a Ruby book too.

Other Things I Discovered at RailsConf
Rails incorporates the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which separates a web application’s data model, user interface, and control logic into three distinct components so that modifications to one component can be made with minimal impact to the others. I didn’t really fully undertand the importance of this design metaphor until attending this conference. MVC makes applications easier to build, maintain, and, as Dave Thomas (not the Dave Thomas you’re thinking of) pointed out, easier for other programmers to read.

Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. It lets the user hit a webserver with a configurable number of concurrent simulated users. Those users place the webserver “under siege.”

Shopify is fancy shopping cart creator built in Rails. It lets you build shops with as much style and flare as you see fit. When you signup for Shopify, you can choose from one of our growing number of custom-made designs or get really creative and create your own designs.

Camping is a tiny web framework, less than 4k, basically a Rails microcosm. Built by why the lucky stiff.

Rails Weenie – find answers to your Ruby on Rails questions

End
All the cool kids say Rails is awesome. And from what I gathered at Railsconf 2006, they appear to be right. We’ll keep you posted as our relationship with Rails blossoms.