The Museum Blogs directory site has been revised and relaunched. We have also added a companion site, Museum Podcasts (www.museumpodcasts.org). Both of these directory and aggregator sites are powered by our own RSS Mixer technology.  The posts, episodes and information about each contributing blog or podcast come directly from their respective RSS feeds. The directories are updated about every hour. 

Museum Blogs and Museum Podcasts have integrated widgets for viewing all posts and episodes in the directory. In addition, there is a ”detail” page for each blog and podcast each with its’ own individual widgets.  All of these widgets can be freely cut-and-pasted into other Websites or blogs. Both directories accept new blogs and podcasts, so if you have any additions please send them along.

The RSS Mixer site is now available! The new alpha release has a ton of new features, a new database structure, and it is running on our own custom-built, dedicated servers. Here’s a brief description of the site from our press release…

RSS Mixer (www.rssmixer.com) is a free service that allows visitors to efficiently mix multiple Web feeds into one. The mixed feed is then viewable as a new RSS feed, Web page, and mobile (iphone) formatted page. All mixes and feeds in RSS Mixer are also available in 5 widget formats: Apple Dashboard Widget, Yahoo! Desktop Widget, Google Gadget, Vista Desktop Widget, and as an embeddable Web widget. There’s even a Media Player Web widget that plays mixed audio and video podcasts.

We have built RSS Mixer to (hopefully) handle whatever comes our way.  For example, I just posted a mix containing over 400 podcast feeds from an OPML file.  All the feeds were added and mixed in a just a couple of minutes. While site is still alpha and we’ll likely have to work out some issues, we’re happy to finally have it publicly available. Thanks to everyone who helped test the private preview releases earlier this year. We’ll post more updates as the site continues to develop.

Update: We suspended the RSS Mixer service in late 2008.

Back in 2005, we developed a video podcast for NASA’s Sun-Earth Education Forum (see Traditions of the Sun). Soon after we were invited to became part of listserv which included everyone who podcasts at NASA. A master list of all NASA podcasts has been compiled and floating around the group for sometime now but it has ever been published. I asked Bryan Walls who administers the group if we could publish it, knowing it would be of interest to some of you.

Here’s what should be a complete list of all NASA sponsored public podcasts.

1. Ask an Astronomer Videos from SIRTF/CalTech (XML | iTunes) Format: M4V (H.264, 320×240, AAC 44.1 Stereo, 650 kbps typical) Started: October ‘05 Average length: 2 minutes Active: Yes

2. Brain Bites Ask NASA from Johnson Space Center (XML) Format: M4V (H.264, 320×180, AAC 44.1) Started: November ‘05 Average Length: 1 minute Active: No

3. Chandra Podcasts from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (XML| iTunes) Format: M4V (H.264, 320×213, AAC 44.1, 680 kbps typical) Started: May ‘06 Average Length: 5 minutes Active: Yes

4. Ciencia @ NASA from Marshall Space Flight Center (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (32kbps mono) Started: Sept ‘05 Average Length: 6minutes Active: Yes

5. Hidden Universe of the Spitzer Space Telescope from SIRTF/CalTech (XML | iTunes) Format: MP4 (H.264, 320×234, AAC Stereo 44.1) Started: May ‘06 Average Length: 3.5 minutes Active: Yes

6. Hubblecast from ESA/Hubble Institute (XML | iTunes) Format: N/A Started: Feb ‘07 Average Length: 5.5 minutes Active: Yes

7. NASA Aeronautics Research Technical Seminars from Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s (ARMD) (RSS | iTunes) Format: MP4 (H.264, 320×234, AAC Stereo 44.1) Started: Nov ‘06 Average Length: 1.3 hours Active: Yes

8. NASA Astrobiology Magazine from Goddard Space Flight Center (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (32 kHz, 64.1 kbps, Mono) Started: June ‘05 Average Length: 7.5 minutes Active: No

9. NASA Digital Learning Network Podcast (XML | iTunes) Format: M4V (320×240 or 320×180, Stereo 44.1 kHz) Started: July ‘06 Average Length: 6 minutes Active: Yes

10. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Podcast (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (128 kbps Stereo) Started: Dec ‘05 Average Length: 8 minutes Active: No

11. NASA Edge Vodcast from Langely Research Center (RSS) Format: MP4 (320×180, 128kbps, AAC Stereo) Started: Mar ‘07 Average Length: 30 minutes Active: Yes

12. NASA Student Opportunities from NASA Education (RSS | iTunes) Format: MP3 (128 kpbs mono) Started: Feb ‘07 Average Length: 10 minutes Active: Yes

13. NASA’s Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum from Goddard Space Flight Center (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (96 kbps Stereo) or M4V (H.264 320×213, AAC 44.1) Started: Dec ‘05 Average Length: 3 minutes Active: Yes

14. NASACast from Headquarters (RSS | iTunes) Format: MP3 (128 kbps Stereo) Started: Sept ‘05 Average Length: 6 minutes Active: Yes

15. NASACast Video from Headquarters (RSS | iTunes) Format: mp4 (MPEG-4, 320×236, AAC 44.1 Stereo, 950 kbps typical) Started: Oct ‘05 Average Length: 6 minutes Active: Yes

16. PlanetQuest – the Search for Another Earth from Jet Propulsion Laboratory (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (44.1 kHz, 160 kbps) Started: Sept ‘05 Average Length: 2.5 minutes Active: Yes

17. Robotics Alliance Project F.I.R.S.T. Competition 2006 from Ames Research Center (XML | iTunes) Format: MP4 (MPEG-4, 320×240, AAC 24, 590 kbps typical) Started: Mar ‘06 Average Length: 1 hour Active: No

18. Robotics Alliance Project F.I.R.S.T. Competition 2007 from Ames Research Center (XML | iTunes) Format: MP4 (MPEG-4, 320×240, AAC 24, 590 kbps typical) Started: Mar ‘07 Average Length: 1 hour Active: Yes

19. The Rovercast from Stennis Space Center (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (44.1 kHz, 160 kbps) Started: July ‘06 Average Length: 1.5 minutes Active: Yes

20. Science @ NASA Feature Stories Podcast from Marshall Space Flight Center (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (44.1 kHz, 56 kbps, Mono) Started: Dec ‘04 Average Length: 1.5 minutes Active: Yes

21. Skywatch/Hubble Watch from STScI/NPR/WYPR 88.1 FM (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (22.05 kHz, 48 kbps, Stereo) Started: Sept ‘05 Average Length: 4 minutes Active: Yes

22. Space Place Musings from Jet Propulsion Laboratory (RSS | iTunes) Format: MP3 (48 kHz, 128 kbps, Stereo) Started: July ‘06 Average Length: 5 minutes Active: Yes

23. Spitzer Space Telescope Podcasts from SIRTF/IPAC/CalTech (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (22.05 kHz, 48 kbps, Stereo) Started: Aug ‘05 Average Length: 6 minutes Active: Yes

24. Traditions of the Sun from Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum (XML | iTunes) Format: M4V (H.264, 320×213, AAC 44.1, 560 kbps typical) Started: Aug ‘05 Average Length: 3 minutes Active: No

25. W. M. Keck Observatory from Keck/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (XML | iTunes) Format: MP3 (22.05 kHz, 56 kbps, Stereo) Started: Aug ‘05 Average Length: 6 minutes Active: Yes

Apple’s latest iPod Tour focuses on museums and features SFMoMA’s Artcasts, Chateau de Versailles, and the Miami Metrozoo. It’s nice to see Apple featuring these museum podcasts, although I was a bit disappointed when I visited The Museum Room in the iTunes store to see all of the offerings. There are some excellent podcasts here from museums like the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate, Hirshorn Museum, but there are only twenty, and none of them are from science museums. Apple, did you really have to include the Dr. Pepper Museum?

While it is great to see museums receive this kind of attention from Apple (they are #76 in popularity among all Websites) hopefully we’ll see a larger and more diverse set of offerings in the future. (Thanks to Craig from KQED Interactive for passing this site along.)

Late last Fall we posted of number video clips we developed with The Tech Museum of Innovation up on YouTube. Admittedly, it was an afterthought, as we originally began work with the Tech on the Understanding Genetics website years before YouTube was much of a force. The video clips in question, came from interviews I conducted at the Future of Science Conference in Venice back in September. The interviews were with an amazing group; Daniel Dennett, Peter Atkins, Marc Hauser, and Ian Tattersall.

The original plan was to post them on the Understanding Genetics site in a Flash video player and then to Podcast them through the website and iTunes. After seeing Ontario Science Centre’s early efforts on YouTube we decided to spend a couple extra hours uploading the video clips to our own channel on the site. Three months later, it is nice to see that some of the Future of Science clips have over 1,000 views. Atleast one has a long discussion associated with it and all 26 clips have at least one rating and a minimum of 100 views. While these are modest numbers, still a few thousand Web visitors who likely would not have seen these interviews on The Tech Museum site or on iTunes saw them on YouTube. (The Understanding Genetics’s website itself receives around 600,000 unique visitors a year.)

We’ll continue to experiment and watch as museums move forward in their efforts to colonize social websites, it seems like a simple and natural extension for projects like Understanding Genetics to expand their reach.

The video interviews we conducted at the Future of Science Conference in Venice, Italy are now available on the Tech Museum’s Understanding Genetics site and on iTunes as a video podcast. We discussed issues surrounding human evolution and genetics with Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, Marc Hauser, and Ian Tattersall.
Along with traveling to Venice, one the great pleasures of this project was preparing for the interviews. All four of these scientists are accomplished authors and I can enthusiastically recommend the following books…

Galileo’s Finger by Peter Atkins provides an introduction to the “Ten Great Ideas in Science.” (Galileo’s actual finger is at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence.) Daniel Dennett’s controversial book Breaking the Spell looks at religion as a social phenomenon. While Marc Hauser’s latest book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong explores the concept that we all have an innate sense of right and wrong. Finally, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness by Ian Tattersall explores the story of own unique development as a species.

(You can learn more about Ideum’s work with the Tech Museum in the Genetics category of the Ideum portfolio.)

Next week, I’ll be attending the Future of Science Conference in Venice, Italy (September 20-23). The conference theme is Evolution and we’ll be covering the Evolution of Life: Darwinism in the light of modern genetics session. The plan is to interview some of the speakers and panel participants.

It’s an incredible line up; Peter Atkins, Ian Tattersall, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Daniel Dennett, Marc Hauser, Steven Pinker, among others. We’ll be posting interviews to the Tech Museum’s Understanding Genetics website later in the month. The video interviews will also be availabe via podcast. The setting is about as nice as it gets too, the conference will be held at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

We’ll post an update from the conference (time permitting) and we’ll let you know when the interviews are available. You can also check in on the conference live as the proceedings will be webcast live via “alice.it.” There’s more information about that on the Future of Science website.

Update (10-11-06): There’s more on the conference in the Future of Science category in this blog. We’re working on the interviews, they should be available on the Tech Museum’s site and through iTunes in the next week or two.

A friend pointed out an interesting post on Fresh + New about the Ontario Science Centre’s weekly podcasts on their Redshift Now site. The post explores the numbers (how many downloads) and where visitors are picking up episodes (iTunes and elsewhere). (I’ll try to see about collecting and sharing some of the number’s from our own Vodcasting efforts.)

Fresh + New goes on to examine aggregation, and asks whether we should replace our manual efforts with some sort of an automated one…

So could/should we individually, or collectively build a ‘Google News’ of museums? Is this even possible?

This is not completely unrelated to the converstation that’s been happening at the Walker Art Center, So what is a “blog carnival”? While on the Walker blog we are discussing more “manual” solutions, I recently toyed with the idea that we might be able to create some sort of a combined RSS Feed.

In other blogs…

Museum Madness blogs about the Walker? The new addition to the Walker Art Center that is. While Loreto Martin fills us in on Warhblog (I blogged Andy Warhol).

Eye Level takes a look at photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, it includes a podcast of a recent lecture. TechStyle reports on the opening of the Pixar Exhibition at the Science Museum (London).

MODE continues to post the Museum Photo of the Week, this one from WA Medical Museum. You can even submit your own photos. Minnesota Science Center’s Science Buzz, Buzz Blog looks the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft.

Assembly let’s us in on a secret. Museum Pro is still all new and coming soon, and finally Mario Bucolo has started an old fashioned Webring.

If that wasn’t enough, the Museum Blog Round Up: 2 and the original Museum Blog Round Up are still available.

Here at Ideum we’ve been video podcasting since Apple released the video capable iPod last fall. We podcast a series of short videos we developed for NASA as part of the Traditions of the Sun site. In addition, we encoded a promotional video developed by the Museum of the African Diaspora, back when we redesigned their site late last year.

Just this week, we created a podcast for the Tech Museum of Innovation. We’ve been working with them on the Understanding Genetics site for the past two years. We’ve helped develop series of short interviews about genetics and ethics. Here are the links to iTunes and to XML files.

iTunes Link:
Traditions of the Sun

Understanding Genetics

Introducing MoAD

XML Link:
Traditions of the Sun

Understanding Genetics

Introducing MoAD

Also, in case you missed it MODE posted a list Museum Podcasts back in February.