A number of museum blogs are mentioned in the latest post on Burning Questions: The official FeedBurner weblog. Entitled, Jackson Pollock didn’t bother with a “Troubleshootize” tab, the post focuses mostly on art museum blogs and podcasts, but it was nice to see a mention of the museum blog survey that I conducted with Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum. He has more on the FeedBurner post on fresh + new blog. FeedBurner for those of you who might not be familiar, it is one of the leading sites that promotes blogs and RSS Feeds.

Public.Resource.Org a “new non-profit dedicated to the creation of public works projects on the Internet” has posted 6,288 images from the Smithsonian on to flickr. They have also written a memo addressed to “The Internet” which they describe their belief that these images are “overwhelmingly” in the public domain.

Update(5-27-07): Boing Boing has more on the controversy.

For an upcoming project, we’re developing an application that automatically takes a snapshot of a Web page and produces a variety of thumbnail-sized images. This application was developed using Firefox on Linux along with some C programming and a little bit of Ruby on Rails development. Please try out this prototype: grab any site you like. Let us know how it works.

Try the Site Screen Shot v.01

(Update August 6, 2007: We’ve taken web page image capture prototype down permanently. The RSS Mixer prototype is still available and there are no plans to take it down.)

The museum blogosphere is growing at a furious pace. In the first four months of the year, we saw 57 blogs added to the Museum Blogs directory. We’ve now surpassed 150 blogs and an astounding 20,000 aggregated posts on the site. Just last month, when Seb Chan and myself presented, Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere at the Museums and Web conference in San Francisco there were 139 blogs. Today, about three weeks later 13 more have appeared. Having just delivered the paper last month, it’s hard to believe an update is needed, but here we are.

It seems like it won’t be so easy to get a handle the museum blogosphere in the future. There should be well over 200 blogs by the end of the year, and next year, who knows? Blogging is becoming (as it should) just another way for museums to connect with the public and each other. In the much the same way as developing a museum Website became common-place in mid-90s, we seem to be on the verge of something similar with blogging in the museum world. Perhaps that threshold is passed once we can’t count all the new museum blogs? For now we’re still counting.

I thought it would be nice to welcome these new blogs with a link. As we’ve seen with other museum blogs, there’s a wide variety of approaches here and they are geared for very different audiences. Take a look at the latest additions…

The Exploratorium Explainers
MuseumLab
Tagwerke (Museum fur Kommunikation, Frankfurt in German)
Thinker Blog (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Telling Lives Blog (American History Workshop)
n8 blog (Stichting Museumnacht, Amsterdam in Dutch)
electronic museum
Museums Remixed (AAM 2007 Conference)
eyes + ears
Office of Exhibits Central (Smithsonian Office of Exhibits Central)
Guided By History (Wells Fargo History Museum)
Arriba y Abajo (Workers Museu Maritim, Barcelona in Spanish and Catalan?)
Youth Exploring Science (St. Louis Science Center)