Back in May of 2006, we launched Museum Blogs (www.museumblogs.org) as an experimental site and to “help increase the community’s awareness and authority.” By authority we meant search rankings and Technorati ranking in particular. By aggregating all of the collective feeds the site has created additional links to all the museum blogs in the directory.

When the site launched there were only around 50 museum blogs and now two years later there are nearly 300 in listed in the directory.  In just a few hours, we will exceed 100,000 blog posts, a pretty remarkable development for the museum blogosphere which, by all estimates, was pretty far behind in using blogging technology.  Two years later blogging is common-place among many museums and is seen as just another way to communicate with the public.

The full program for the Museums and the Web 2008 conference is now available on their Website. For the first time in a couple of years, Ideum will be in the exhibit hall. Our exhibitor information can be found here.

Along with exhibiting, I’ll be offering two half-day workshops at the conference. Rather than repeat last year’s workshops (Museum Mashups and Real Science 2.0), I decided to explore some new topics this year. We’ll be exploring the future of Web video in a workshop entitled, Online Video Editing. The other workshop, Everything RSS, looks at how Web feeds are increasingly manipulated by a variety of online tools. The conference runs April 9-12 in beautiful Montréal, Canada.

I just read a post from MuseumLab blog which directed to me to the Dashboard on the newly redesigned Indianapolis Museum of Art website. The concept of a “Dashboard” isn’t new, in fact there is even a book on Dashboard Design, but this the first time I’ve come across a dashboard in the museum world, and I have to say it is pretty interesting.

A combination of Web statistics, visitor and collections information, and even a monthly average of the museum’s electric consumption can be found on the IMA’s Dashboard. Clicking through to “more” doesn’t provide any additional information about the particular item, but it does take you to a page that lists which dashboard items have been recently updated.

There is also a comment feature, but I didn’t come across any comments, probably because the redesign is still new and registration is required to post. Also, there is an RSS Feed available on the Dashboard, but unfortunately this appears to be static. Still even with these minor issues, this a great example of a museum presenting basic information about the institution in a dynamic and unconventional way.

Tomorrow, I am making a presentation at the Oakland Museum for Cultural Connections. The topic for the event is Technology: Connecting online and in-gallery experiences. This event is a precursor to the Western Museums Association (WMA) Annual Conference, which starts on Thursday. At WMA, I’m participating in a session entitled “An Eye on Design,” which explores preconceptions about museum design. I will be focusing on technology (of course!) and how it affects visitor experiences.

The image on the left was one I came across while putting together my presentations. It was taken in 1995 and shows the “Internet Rountable,” which was part of the Multimedia Playground exhibit at the Exploratorium. Back then, the Internet was novel enough to be an exhibit by itself.

On Friday, I’ll be taking part in the “Shake Out on the Emerging Web 2.0″ session. There, I’ll present a general introduction to the topic and then focus on the use of Flickr by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. I will follow up with a short look at two very different art museums in Second Life (this is based on my review in the ExhibitFiles).

On Tuesday of next week, I will be co-presenting at the “Web 2.0, the Sequel: What’s Now? What’s Next?” session at the Association of Science - Technology Center’s (ASTC) Annual Conference in Los Angeles. With so many presentations (4 in 7 days!), I haven’t been posting much to the blog lately. That will change by the end of this month as we have a few exciting projects that are close to launch. More to come.

I just posted a review of the Second Life version of the City of Dresden’s Old Masters Picture Gallery on the ExhibitFiles site. Touring this formal museum space was an interesting experience, made even more so given my company. My good friend and Second Life artist, DanCoyote, was kind enough to show me around and share his insights about this virtual world.

Following our trip to the virtual Picture Gallery, we toured DanCoyote’s latest installation, Full Immersion Hyperformalism. The ExhibitFiles review contains links (SLURLs) to both spaces in Second Life along with pictures of our tour.