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.

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.

Yesterday, Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum and I presented our paper, Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere at the Museums and the Web conference. Following the presentation we had a lunchtime meet up and discussion about the future of museums and blogging. It was nice meet many of the folks beyond the blogs that I’m so familiar with. Here’s a round up of resources and posts from the session.

• Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere (the paper on the MW 2007 site)
• Our presentation in PDF format radicaltrust.pdf (800k)
• Live blogging of the session by Nate Schroeder at the Walker Art Center’s New Media Initiatives Blog.

Following our lunch I was thinking that this will likely be the last time we can easily survey the museum blogosphere since its growth has accelerated so dramatically in recent months. A big part of our presentation focused on the changes we’ve seen just since the December survey! You can see for yourself over at MuseumBlogs where there are now 139 blogs listed. Back in December when we conducted our original survey there were 95. What’s next for the museum blogosphere? Perhaps we can continue that conversation on our various blogs.

(Update:  There’s a discussion underway on the Walker New Media Blog about the session and museum blogging in general. Questacon Online has a post about the session and bloggers meet up and more. There’s also much more about the Museums and the Web Conference at Fresh + New, I’m in Ur Museum Website…, and of course the conference blog has a number of posts about various presentations and events.)

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 Real Science 2.0, there’s another post for Museum Mashups.

In case you’re wondering, the colorful image of the Pacific Ocean on the left comes from NASA’s SeaWIFS and MODIS/Aqua missions. The bright colors show chlorophyll concentrations in the water.

Workshop Description
Originally developed as tool to help scientists share information, the World Wide Web continues to be an important mode of communication for scientific inquiry. Rich scientific data-sets in a variety of fields are publicly available, and can provide a unique catalyst for learning. As the Internet continues to evolve, there are new opportunities for science centers to develop rich web resources which can connect visitors to scientific imagery and data.

Science Centers can act as mediators, organizing information across scientific disciplines and providing tools for understanding complex scientific research. Users can gain a unique insight into the scientific process and Science Centers can do what they do best – make science understandable and interesting to the public. With a new generation of interactive and social technologies available, Science Centers are presented with new challenges and possibilities.

Developing online resources that mine datasets from “real” scientific endeavors can help explain the scientific process with a unique relevancy. Furthermore these types of resources can provide a link, both actual and metaphoric, to the scientific community.

This half-day workshop will explore in technical, educational, and design aspects of incorporating datasets, with a focus on real-time images and datasets. We’ll explore some of the technical aspects of developing rich online experiences in Macromedia Flash, as well as other approaches that incorporate Web 2.0 technologies such as mashups, blogs, rss feeds, and community sites. We’ll present examples and discuss various technical approaches to incorporating these types of data and ways in which visitors can interact with and manipulate scientific imagery.

Beyond the technical aspects, we’ll look at the content questions and design considerations involved in utilizing these types of data in public websites and exhibits. After all, scientific datasets are produced for scientists, not for the general public. Through a rapid design exercise, we’ll explore some of the questions concerning how data are presented, mediated, and made available for public audiences.

Bookmarks (for this workshop and Museum Mashups):
http://del.icio.us/mw2007

The Presentation (the activity is not included):
realscience-2007.pdf (1.8 megs)

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)

Our paper summarizing the findings from the first museum blog survey is now available on the Museums and the Web 2007 website. Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum and I conducted the survey back in December. For our presentation at the conference in San Francisco, we’ll discuss what these results mean and take another look at museum blogs to see how things have changed even over the last few months. For those of you attending, we’ll also be having a meet up of museum bloggers following the session. See you in San Francisco.

This year’s Museums and the Web conference will be held in San Francisco from April 11th to the 14th. I’ll be conducting two half-day workshops, Museum Mashups and Real Science 2.0 on the first day of the conference. I’ll share some of the materials from those workshops on this blog following the conference.

Also, I’ll be presenting The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. with Catherine Baudoin from the Maxwell Museum and Beth Maloney who was the primary writer and education specialist on the project. We’ll be showing the site on Saturday during the demo session. (On a separate note this site was recently mentioned in Ten Cool Examples of Nonprofits Using Flickr on Blogher.)

On Friday April 13th, Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum and myself will be presenting Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere. Our paper should be published by the end of the week on the website for the Museums and the Web conference. The paper includes findings from a survey of nearly 50 individuals who operate museum blogs. Museums and the Web just started posting papers yesterday check out the speakers list and you can see what’s available.

Seb and I have been asked about organizing a meeting of museum bloggers. We were thinking that Friday after our session, we might all go for an extended lunch (perhaps 11:30 to 1:00 or so). For convenience sake, it is probably best to meet somewhere in the hotel. Bloggers, please let us know if you’re interested.

It should be a great conference and it’s always good to get back to our old home town. I hope to see some of you there.

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.

We are conducting the first comprehensive survey looking at museum blogs and blogging practices. If you write for, or operate a museum or museum-related blog, please fill out the survey on the Museum Blogs website.

Seb Chan (Powerhouse Museum) and Myself (Ideum) are the conducting the survey. The results will be presented in a session, Radical Trust: The state of the museum blogosphere at the Museums and Web Conference in San Francisco in April 2007. We will also link to our paper from both the Ideum blog and the Powerhouse’s fresh + new blog.

The purpose of the survey is to capture a snapshot of the technologies, aims, policies, uses, and impact of blogging in the museum sector. 2006 has been an amazing year for the field, what were 20 blogs back in January is now a community of nearly 100 museum-related blogs. The results from the survey will help organizations plan and justify future projects utilizing blogs and other social technologies. Please feel free to repost or otherwise pass this on.

Update (12-19-06): There’s a a discussion forming over on the fresh + new blog where this story is cross-posted.
Update (12-21-06): We have 31 responses to the survey and there is a running total of the multiple choice questions. If you run a museum blog and haven’t filled out the survey please do. Update (01-31-06) We are not longer accepting survey responses.
(04-09-07) There’s more on the paper and the presentation for Museums and the Web here.

Gyroscope, an exhibit design firm based in Oakland, CA has just released a report on how museums are using “new communication technologies to enhance and extend the visitor experience.”

The paper Museums in Transition: Emerging Technologies as Tools for Free-Choice Learning was commissioned by the Science Museum of Virginia. Based on reviewing available publications along with interviews of twenty-four museum professionals (including myself), the report takes a comprehensive look at how museums are using Web 2.0 technologies, handheld devices, and other innovations. Museums in Transition is available as a PDF file on the Gyroscope website.