A packed day today at the National Digital Forum in Wellington, NZ. Here’s the first of probably a couple of posts as I’m going through my notes.

This morning’s keynote was delivered by Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled, Let’s see what happens if … Experimenting with emerging technologies on the V&A website. Toby presented the story behind many of the innovative things the museum has been up to over the last few years. Perhaps the most compelling part of this very interesting presentation focused on the Design Your Own Arts and Crafts Tile interactive.

While it was designed as a creative tool to allow visitors to create their own tiles, it wasn’t long before visitors began to use it to connect with each other. The Design Your Own Arts and Crafts Tile interactive provided only a limited text area for adding titles to tiles that users created, but over time some visitors used these text areas and their tile designs to communicate with each other. In one instance, after a few exchanges, a visitor passed along their email address. Since the title text area doesn’t allow “@” symbols and allows for a very limited number of characters–this had to be creatively communicated. It’s a great example of how even a limited suite of (interesting) tools can still allow for innovation, and how visitors will use your site in ways that you can’t always anticipate.

Toby wrapped up by talking more broadly about the how other museums in the UK are using (or not using) Web 2.0 tools. A highlight here was the Institute of Contemporary Arts which is making extensive use of blogging. Apparently lots of staff, everyone from the Director of the museum, down has been blogging at the site.

A lively Q & A following Toby’s presentation focused, not surprisingly on internal issues of institutional support and sustainability, as well as the moderation of user-created content. These are topics that many museums (and others) are struggling with as they begin to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies.

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is hosting the Digital Forum here in the capital city of Wellington. It’s a beautiful space, although honestly, I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to check out the exhibits (perhaps today). From what I’ve seen the museum contains a mix of art and artifacts with a focus of the taonga (“treasures” in the Maori language) of New Zealand. They also have a Kid’s Zone which contains hands-on exhibits and programs for early learners.

The first day of the Digital Forum focused mostly on collections and archives. I presented the keynote, Museums and the Web 2.0 in the morning and then caught a few of the sessions later in the day. I missed a few sessions and haven’t have much time to blog as my luggage (with my camera) showed up three days late! So that’s kept me rather busy.

In the morning I saw Virginia Gow from the National Library of New Zealand present on Matapihi, which allows visitors to search for multimedia (mostly photos) from across heritage collections.

In afternoon, there a was a session that focused on various Maori information initiatives. Te Anau Tuiono presented his experiences at on the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005. He talked about the importance of including the needs of indigenous peoples into a UN Declaration. Teanau Tuiono also mentioned someone closer to home, he cited a summit address entitled, “Information is not Knowledge” by Joe Shirely Jr. (the PDF is here) who is the President of The Navajo Nation.

In the same session, Haami Piripi from the Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori (The Maori Language Commission) shared with us an amazing open source Maori dictionary, matapuna.org. The idea of this unique database is ensure that the Maori language is one of use. As Haami explained the Maori language is still in danger, as the strongest Maori speakers tend to be older and geographically dispersed.

Today, there are a number of interesting sessions with more of a museum focus. I will post some of the highlights from these presentations soon.

Tomorrow I’m off to New Zealand for the National Digital Forum 2006: Participating with Communities: Digital opportunities, collaborations and celebration. I’ll be presenting a keynote entitled, Museums and Web 2.0.

Other folks from abroad such as Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, Toby Travis from the Victoria Albert Museum, and Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art will also be presenting, along with a number of speakers from New Zealand. It should be a very interesting week concluding with an “unconference” of informal interactive sessions.

My speech will focus on some of the same issues I presented on back in February in Ottawa for the Canadian Heritage Information Network. However, the changes in the field since then have been remarkable and there are many new developments to talk about.

As the year began, there were only about 20 museum or museum-related blogs. Now there are nearly 90 listed in the museum blogs directory. In general, museums seem much more interested in the potential that social websites and other Web 2.0 technologies present. Also, we are just starting to see museums entering into existing social spaces such MySpace, YouTube, SecondLife, and Flickr. Obviously these new developments raise a host of new issues for the field.

I’ll post next from New Zealand and share some of the findings from the conference. You may want to check out Fresh + New blog next week too, as I imagine Seb Chan will be posting during the conference as well.

I’ve finally found the time to put together quick post about the course I taught last week at the University of Victoria up in British Columbia. The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World focused on Web 2.0 technologies and techniques and their potential uses in the museum world.

While the heart of the week-long course was comprised of face-to-face discussions and small-group design “challenges,” we utilized a number of Web 2.0 technologies as well. Of course we had a blog (The New Web), a flickr pool, a set of del.icio.us bookmarks, and even a Shelfari site for reference books. (The bookmarks are perhaps one of the more interesting resources that came out of the course, over 100 links in all.)

Also added to the mix were two guest speakers joining us via video conference. Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum talked about their exciting Collections Database, which includes the ability for visitors to tag objects in the collection. Seb also shared with us the story behind their growing collection of blogs; fresh + new, Great Wall of China Blog, Views from the Sydney Observatory, and Free Radicals.

Kevin von Appen who helped develop the Ontario Science Centre’s innovative RedShift Now website explained the connection between the museum floor and the RedShift site. (Kevin is presenting in the picture at the top of this post.) We also discussed the Science Centre’s recent posting of videos on YouTube (check out the plasma ball video). They are one of the first science museums in the world to do so.

One the course participants, Jim Groom has put together a couple of detailed posts about each of these guest speakers in his Bavatuesdays blog. Take a look at The Powerhouse Museum: the Name Says it All and The Ontario Science Center’s “RedShift Now” Jim describes each video conference and discussion much better than I could.

It was great to get away for a week and to have the opportunity explore and discuss some of the profound changes that are happening on the Web and what it means for museums. Having a mix of museum professionals, educators, and students made the experience all the more enjoyable, and the discussions and presentations were quite lively and interesting.

I hope to post more about some the ideas that came out of our week together in the next week or so, but for now I’m busy getting ready for the National Digital Forum in New Zealand. More on that very soon.

Recently, we tried our hand and developing a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, the Solar Viewer. We built the Yahoo! Widget version earlier in the year with some success–at least as far the number of downloads are concerned. Having developed now for two of the more popular widget platforms (we haven’t looked at Google Gadgets, Opera Widgets, or DesktopX, yet) there are few interesting sites in Dashboard and Yahoo! Widget world worth pointing out. These sites are great for finding new widgets or for promoting ones that you’ve developed.

For the Mac OS X Dashboard there is of course the official Apple Dashboard site, which includes a Top 50 listing. (The Solar Viewer is currently #34, is #20 moving up the charts (updated 11/16/06) between a Tarot Reading widget and one that links to movie trailers.) Yahoo! Widgets has a similar directory although it could use a Top 50 (or some other way of browsing) as widgets get quickly buried on their site.

Mac Update has an extensive list of Dashboard widgets and they actually went to the trouble of posting the Solar Viewer and then emailing us, inviting us to become a developer. Once you’ve signed up as a developer, you get access to tools to track the number of downloads, rating and comments. You can also start an adword campaign to promote your software, which is why Mac Update is so helpful in getting you started. Still, the tools are well designed and the site is relatively easy to use, whether you’re looking for widgets or promting one.

Dashboard Widgets has the latest news on Apple Dashboard widgets directed primarily at the widget developer. However, there is also an excellent showcase which contains over 1,500 widgets for Mac OS X.

Softpedia is a massive collection of software of all kinds widgets included, but I’ve found it difficult to search and to use.

Widgipedia has a decidedly “Web 2.0â€? look and feel and it is “Beta” (of course). The concept is a good one, although it doesn’t get as nearly much traffic as some of the other more established directories listed here do, perhaps it will in time. The site keeps track of the High Rated, Latest Widgets and has all sorts of “viralâ€? software tools for emailing and embedding links and RSS feeds of their categories. The site accepts and contains a variety of desktop widgets; Dashboard, Yahoo!, and even DesktopX ones can be found.

WidgetWorld is yet another widget directory this one is based in the Netherlands. It looks like they’re just getting started as they only have about two dozen widgets. Although, it was nice to see they already had the Solar Viewer in their collection.

Finally, I came across The Flip Side, a well-designed blog for Mac Dashboard widget developers. There’s a number of resources for developers including what must be the world’s only podcast for widget developers. There are also links to what appear to be “widget only” design and development firms such as Taco Widgets, WidgetMachine, among others. Flip Side promises more posts and podcasts soon. We’ll be watching.

Real World Software Development has posted an enormous list of Web 2.0 sites, the Best of the Best Web 2.0 sites. All of these site are (of course) checked by the Web 2.0 validator. Which is one step above (or below?) the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator.

The list is extensive, but surprisingly there’s no mention of LibraryThing, Shelfari (which we wrote about recently, Our new (Beta) bookshelf on Shelfari), and Whatsonmybookshelf. Also missing is BlueDot (social bookmarking), JumpCut (video editing), and Splice (audio editing). Still there must be over 100 sites here many that I’ve never come across.

As someone who observed the first Internet bubble up-close in San Francisco, I’m finding the proliferation of Web 2.0 sites just as remarkable. Yesterday Business Week ran an article, Bubble 2.0? in it a longtime venture investor, Todd Dagres suggest a 1% success rate, “For every one that works, another 100 will fail.” I guess we’ll find out soon enough if he’s right.

We’ve just finished developing version 1.0 of the Solar Viewer widget this time as a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. Earlier in the year we developed a Yahoo! widget version that works with both Mac and Windows, although you’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine to make it go.
Both versions (Yahoo! and Mac Dashboard) show the latest images of the sun from NASA satellites and ground-based observatories. More information about the images and links to larger images are provided. We first collected all of the amazing solar images for the Sun Earth Viewer, a Flash-based interactive that we developed with NASA back in 2004.

If you’re interested we posted a how-to for Yahoo! Widgets when we developed the first version of the Solar Viewer. We hope to have some time in the next couple of weeks to do something similar for the Mac version.

The Dashboard widget should be available on the Apple site soon. In the meantime, you can download it from Solar Viewer Widget page in the Ideum portfolio.

Today is Election Day in the U.S. and we are once again reminded that voting is a right. (It is not a privilege as our highest elected official stated just this morning.) Over the last week or so we’ve come across some interesting sites worth sharing.

First, if you need to know where to vote go to Vote411.org. For an interesting experience in viewing the results, there is an election mashup that combines Google Earth and Google Maps (CNET has the story). It is available with the Google Earth pack. Unfortunately, it is a Windows only add on. For all platforms, the New York Times has an interesting Flash-based interactive Election Guide and Map as does the Washington Post.

To gain some historical insight and to see an interesting Web 2.0 application, take a look at the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. Use the slider to see the top “keywords” in speeches over the last 200+ years. Finally, for a reminder about what today is all about, check out the Interactive Constitution at the National Constitution Center.

Flash is a great technology for presenting information to the user in an interesting, fun, functional and predictable way. It’s installed on nearly every internet-capable machine on the planet, and it’s perfect for deploying a rich media-driven experience. Despite its advantages the system has several noticeable drawbacks. Current cross platform support is uneven (although Flash 9 promises support for Linux, Mac, and Windows), textual content is displayed using a flash-specific renderer (native OS/WM text support is more functional, IMHO), and Flash files are impossible for search engines to index.

Re-enter the lingua franca of the Web: HTML. Supported (albeit at different levels) on every Internet-capable machine and utilizing the host system’s native libraries, standard HTML pages are visible to web crawlers, regular surfers, and users requiring special accessibility features. For example, you can link directly or bookmark the Ideum portfolio, or astronomy exhibits, or an individual project like Tour the Solar System. This was simply not possible with our Flash portfolio.

Considering our strong focus on video and exhibit development Flash was perfect for our portfolio. Things have changed dramatically in the past year, though. Server-side libraries are making client-side programming easy – the limitations of the infamous XMLHttpRequest object are more readily apparent, and mature libraries such as prototype and script.aculo.us make programming responsive desktop-like Web applications a breeze. An integration with Flash where we need to show video (like our Fuel Cell Q & A exhibit) fills multimedia voids that HTML/Javascript have yet to deliver. We decided things had advanced enough to make the Ideum portfolio a Web 2.0 application, and to create it we utilized some powerful, freely available software.

Ruby on rails makes the creation of some remarkable web sites very simple. We learned what Rails was capable of at RailsConf 2006, and decided it was time to give the system a shot. Remember CGI in C++? Validating user input was difficult, buffer overruns were all but avoidable, and actually creating something that looked halfway decent was impossible. When PHP made it’s debut the world (or at least those of us here) breathed a collective sigh of relief. PHP made it possible to quickly take user input and write to the browser. It handled Apache integration for us, and made web programming remarkably easy. Recently things have gotten even better.

If you’ve gotten this far you’ve probably heard of the MVC (Model, view, controller) architecture, as present in Ruby on Rails (and several other frameworks such as Django, CakePHP, and Struts). Instead of grabbing information from the request, looping through that information, and then echoing certain values to the response when the process comes across them, a ‘controller’ (ideally) contains all the application logic, and computed values are sent from it to a ‘view’ – a template that can be designed independently of the controller. Not only does the Ruby on Rails system offer MVC, but it also contains thousands of readily available functions for anything from html sanitizing to file serving. When swapping languages (in this case ActionScript to Ruby), you generally have to re-build your heavily used utility functions. Rails comes with most of what you need, so instead of laboring over input sanitizing and XML parsing, you get started with the real application immediately.

Development of the new portfolio was painless. Database integration, application processing and display is seamless and nearly automatic in rails. We were able to quickly set up a mailing list, a system for sorting portfolio items by category, and several other relatively static pages. Although in future plans, we currently don’t utilize a custom blogging solution. WordPress is a great tool, and we’ve no urgent need to dispose of it and start over. Since the portfolio is integrated with the blog in a number of ways, access to the blog information was essential. Our first attempt was opening a second database connection using the RoR ActiveRecord connection functions. We were successful in opening and querying the WordPress database for recent posts, but after five requests the connection would spontaneously close. This was a MySQL issue on the testing machine, but since one doesn’t always have unobstructed access to MySQL settings we decided to take another approach and simply merged the WordPress and portfolio databases.

Javascript plays an important, albeit relatively transparent role on the site. You’ll notice the “Screen Width” option in the upper right hand corner of the page. We made some adjustments to the standard prototype library to include stylesheet swapping and a few extra DOM functions. At first we determined that the “Screen Width” link would simply route to the javascript function which would swap between two stylesheets, the regular one and a smaller version. After the function was implemented we found that both Windows and Linux would resize the images without anti aliasing. A small script on the server now creates a second set of images, sized (with anti-aliasing) for the smaller screen, and a new routine swaps the image source when the screen width is changed.

Internet Explorer doesn’t like stylesheet changes (or much of anything, really), and refused to re-render the images. We wrote a special case procedure for IE, which sends a request to the server in the background, telling it to send images pre-sized for a specific stylesheet. After forcing a refresh, the new style is applied. As the site neared completion we began to integrate the flash videos, only to realize that we needed a procedure to resize them, as well. Resizing flash videos can be tricky, as the browser tends to cache them immediately. The simple solution? Just copy the HTML from the containing element, set the containing element’s HTML to nothing, and then insert the copied HTML. The browser will refresh the video. The same technique is used during the slide show to prevent and start playback at the appropriate time. Unfortunately, the same problem with image quality appeared with the flash video, and we were forced to resize each one for storage on the server side.

Our custom content management system also witnessed a few core changes during the portfolio build. The CMS is quite simple in concept: 1) track certain collections of components on a web page, and 2) allow those components to contain value maps and react to outside messages. We utilized the CMS in some static sites. The goal in which was to track the changes to the page, strip all unnecessary markup, and save the result to the file which was loaded. The result is an amazingly simple utility which is easily applied to any static page. When it came to utilizing it for the portfolio site we were able to fully explore the opportunities present in what became a very nifty little library.

Each piece of data on the page is tagged and aware of its relation to the database. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much the core concept of an ORM (Object-relational mapping system). ORM’s will take a database table, and transform it into a representation native to whatever language you’re programming in. SQLObject (Python), Hibernate (Java), and ActiveRecord (Ruby) are some pretty popular ORM systems for those with interest. To the best of our knowledge we are the first ones to ever create an ORM system that operates via Javascript.

Through a Ruby on Rails layer we’re able to allow Javascript to both pull information from the database, and insert/update the database depending on what changes are made – all via HTML. It’s truly interesting stuff, and allows for the addition of amazing and natural authoring ability to any page we build, while letting the designer maintain styles and certain aspects so the user doesn’t accidentally break the page layout with an edit. We’ll post an introduction to the CMS later this month.