We’ve just completed a series of changes to the ExhibitFiles website including: improved “member contacts,” better commenting, and enhanced member profiles. It’s now possible to include blog feeds and flickr thumbnails in your profile. You can see mine here, or click below.

Along with improvements to profiles and commenting, a new search feature was developed. While the ExhibitFiles is only a couple of months old, there are already over 40 case studies and reviews and more than 200 members. Finding the right exhibit or a colleague’s profile was becoming increasingly difficult. The new search feature allows you to conduct a full-text search or you can click on a topic, institution, or individual in a case study or review to bring back results. For example, clicking an exhibit focus such as “Science” brings back the 15 records that share that focus.

We’re still fine tuning the search feature, but we hope this and other new features will help the ExhibitFiles continue to grow and make it even easier to use.

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.

This week about 20 more photographs were added to the John Collier Jr. site on flickr (including this gem on the left taken in 1943 in Questa, New Mexico.) This is the first new set photos to be added since The American Image website went live back in January. (You can learn more about this project in our portfolio.) Our partners at the Maxwell Museum of the Anthropology will be adding more great Collier images over the next few months. The American Image site uses a flickr mashup, so as new photos are added they automatically appear within the Collection and inside the Shooting Script activity. Back on flickr, it was nice to see so many positive comments about the new photos. John Collier Jr. now has well over 100 contacts in flickr.

Along with the two photo mashups, the Propaganda Filmmaker a Flash-based online video editor that allows visitors to create their own short movies has been very active. (I posted more about the online video editor earlier this year.) Over 200 “propaganda films” have been made, with new ones appearing daily. Our visitors’ creativity in working with the 150 clips that are provided has shined through. An American Hero does a great job of telling a very literal story, while Oh! Irony! as the name suggests, conveys a very different message–all of this in less than 40 seconds! You can check out the Top Ten and the latest videos here, or make your own. It’s great to see what visitors will create when we develop interesting tools for them to use.

Today I’m conducting two half-day workshops at the Museums and the Web Conference in San Francisco. This blog post contains the workshop description and the course materials for Museum Mashups, there’s another post for Real Science 2.0: Interacting with Scientific Imagery and Live Data.

The image on left is a termite “catherdral” mound, an example of the theory of emergence in nature. I decided to use this image after rading Alex Iskold’s article on Yahoo! Pipes, where he talks about emergence (part of complexity theory) and its relation to Web 2.0.

Workshop Description
Perhaps more than any other approach or Web technology, mashups exemplify “Web 2.0.” These unique web applications draw on content from more that one source to create something new. With hundreds of open APIs (Application Programming Interface) to choose from, over 1000 mashups have been created in just the past two years. Google maps, Flickr photos, and many other data sources and services are now available to designers and developers.

Unfortunately, few museums have explored the promise that mashups present. While some of the APIs are commercial in nature, many are relevant to the museum world and could be used to create compelling interactive experiences for museum visitors. Mashups have the potential to allow visitors to access archives, collections, and scientific data in innovative and exciting ways.

As museums slowly begin to explore other Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging and social networking applications, the potential for tapping into these communities with mashups increases. Our visitors are already using mashups and many of the core technologies that open APIs are making accessible.

This half-day workshop will explore the technical and design aspects of mashups. We’ll look at some of the examples that are out there and discuss the technology behind them. We’ll explore some of the more popular open APIs and talk about the possibilities they present.

Finally, we’ll explore the design issues surrounding these unique web applications. Due to the complex nature of mashups and the fact that many are produced solely by programmers, usability and visitor experience is often compromised. We’ll look at what is emerging as “best practices” in the development on mashups with a focus on design. Through a rapid design exercise we’ll take a look at the conceptual, information, and visual design aspects of mashups.

Bookmarks (for this workshop and RealScience 2.0):
http://del.icio.us/mw2007

The Presentation (The activity is not included):
museummashups-2007.pdf (800K)

KQED Quest is the Mashup of the Day on the Programmable Web site, the authoritative directory of mashups and Web 2.0 APIs (application programming interface). Two other Ideum design sites appear in the directory as well: The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. and Recycle Torrance. As the Programmable Web shows, we are not alone in experimenting with mashups, the number continues to rise and recently surpassed 1,500 mashups.

While we’re on the topic, a few thoughts to share about mashup design. What draws us to mashups is the ability rapidly and cost effectively develop complex user-experiences. A few years ago we developed a custom mapping program in Adobe Flash for the Traditions of the Sun: Chaco Culture website, developing this as a mashup would have saved hundreds of hours in programming time. (The mashup services were simply not available when we created the site.) In addition, using a well-known service such as Google Maps also means that users are more likely to be familiar with them. Visitors know how to pan and zoom, change from map to satellite view, and so on. Not having to develop an entire user-interface from scratch is a major plus. Again, reducing further development time.

With sites like Flickr, the attraction is the ability to store, manage and share content. For the American Image project, having a ready-made database with a built in content-management system, allowed us to focus on other aspects of the project. The fact that we could also connect with the Flickr community has turned out to be a factor in the success of the project. So far, more people have seen John Collier Jr.’s work on Flickr then on the American Image site itself.

While this all is very positive, there are some drawbacks. You have to include the service site’s branding, there is a bit of learning curve in mashup development at first, and there can be technical limitations and obstacles in using an API as opposed to developing something from scratch. One major issue we ran into repeatedly with the KQED Quest mashups was Javascript implementation across various browsers: IE 6 and 7 and Apple’s Safari were all problematic at different times.

I’ll be posting more about mashups in the coming weeks, as I begin prepare for two half-day workshops for the Museums and the Web conference. I’ll be teaching: Museum Mashups and Real Science 2.0 Interacting with scientific imagery and live data at the conference which is held April in San Francisco.