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.

In designing and developing The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. website with The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology we’ve found ourselves spending a lot of time in Flickr. The Collection of photographs found on the site are pulled in from Flickr using a Flash-base mashup. The Shooting Script activity works in similar way: pulling out John Collier Jr’s images as well as those of other Flickr members. An earlier post, Colonizing Social Spaces, looked more broadly at the benefits and drawbacks of museums utilzing social networking sites. In this post, I’m going to look exclusively at Flickr and our experience with the American Image site.

Many Mashups
We looked a number of interesting Flickr mashups before we began the project and there are plenty of examples to look at. ProgrammableWeb lists 152 Flickr mashups and can imagine there are more that aren’t listed there. Along with the sheer number of examples, there are a lot ways to go in developing a Flickr mashup. The Flickr API supports a wide range different technologies; the “API kits” go from ActionScript to Ruby. We decided on using Adobe Flash (although currently we’re developing a mashup using Ruby on Rails).

One of the better mashups we came across was Findr developed by Doug Marttila. He was kind enough to let us see his code and although we wound up developing something from scratch, Doug’s code help us get up to speed. Findr is a good example of just how feature-rich Flickr mashups can be. The mashups developed for the American Image site are decidedly simple.

Back on Flickr
John Collier Jr’s Flickr site which pre-dates the launch of the American Image has already received 2,000 views. Back in October when put up the first test images we began to get interest. Almost immediately, we received comments and had photographs favorited. As a way to connect with these visitors we added them as contacts. Since we (The Maxwell Museum and Ideum) are representing John Collier Jr. who died in 1992, we’ve decided not to go out and comment or favorite others photographs. While this is certainly the correct approach it does limit our ability to fully operate within the Flickr community site. By favoriting and commenting on others photographs, you can increase your network and drive traffic to your Flickr site.

We have joined a number of groups and have been adding photographs as way to make connections with different communities. Right now John Collier Jr. is a member of 28 Flickr groups. Some groups are regional ones like Essence of Maine or The American Southwest, others focus on black and white photography, and still others focus on vintage photographs or very specific topics like Farm and farmer or Caves and Mines. In the Farm and farmer group we received an interesting comment on Collier’s photo Feeding time for baby beeves. Apparently, we (John Collier Jr.?) don’t know the difference between dairy and beef cows? The things you learn on Flickr!

Joining groups has made an enormous difference in bringing traffic into the Collier Flickr site and has helped make contacts. However, you can’t join every group on Flickr and plaster the same photo in every group. Recently, Flickr has cracked down on this practice as many were using it to boost “interestingness” flooding as many 60 or 70 groups with the same photo.

Interestingness
Undoubtedly, interestingness is a unique Web 2.0 invention. Yahoo! (who owns Flickr) has even gone to the extreme of patenting it, while others think it might be Yahoo!’s secret weapon in its search battle with Google. We are interested (in interestingness?) because we want people to see John Collier Jr’s amazing photographs and we of course we are curious.

One of John Collier Jr’s photographs, Albert Gagnon’s daughters knitting was among Flickr’s Top 500, the most interesting photographs on October 26, 2006. On that date it was #245. As of yesterday it had dropped to #283. Interestingness is continually calculated based a variety of criteria. As Flickr’s About Interestingness page tells us…

“There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.”

Recently, I came across Scout a tool that let’s you find and monitor the position of your photographs on Flickr. (This only tracks those that are in the Top 500, or Flickr’s “Explore.”) Finding Albert Gagnon’s daughters knitting and its’ history in Scout I thought it might be interesting to conduct a crude experiment.

I emailed a few friends and asked a few people here at the studio if they would favorite and comment on the photograph. (It helps when you think the photograph really is a great one.) Two of the comments were posted weeks ago. We added seven more comments, and favorited the photo seven times and pushing it up about 40 places in interestingness ranking for the day, landing at #242, its highest ranking ever.

While were not advocating gaming the Flickr system (although I guess that’s what we did?), it is interesting to get a glimmer of how interestingness works and what’s involved in changing a photograph’s ranking. Moving a photo posted in October from #283 to #242 took seven people, not much of a payoff for the effort. Certainly as we continue to develop mashups, having a better understanding of how applications like Flickr work is essential.

Update (1-17-06): After this post was written, an additional comment and a favorite helped boost Albert Gagnon’s daughters knitting to #164 on Flickr’s top 500. It may be that this new activity helped reach some sort of an “interestingness threshold,” catapulting the photo 80 places up. Or perhaps the timing was a factor. Most of the original comments and favorites happened within a relatively short period of time. There certainly more to learn about interestingness.

Also, The American Image: Photographs of John Collier Jr. was listed in the Best New Mashups on the Programmable Web blog.