Last July, we posted a prototype Web application, RSS Mixer that allowed anonymous visitors to mix RSS (and Atom) feeds together. Back then the page got a lot of notice. There was a blog post from Mashable, one from CNET’s Webware, a brief article in Brazil’s largest newspaper, and literally hundreds of other links from all over the world. The prototype site continues to get traffic and it will surpass 5,000 user-generated mixes and added 10,000 feeds any day now.

Next month, we’ll be releasing a new version of RSS Mixer. The alpha version will still allow for anonymous mixing, but registered (free) users will be able save and edit their mixes. A new and vastly improved feed mixer will update RSS and Atom feeds quickly, pulling images and other rich media. A number of other improvements including enhanced language support, full search, tagging, feed statistics and ranking, and many others will all be part of the package. We will announce the release date in early February.  Update: We will be releasing the new version of RSS Mixer this summer.

In January I will be teaching a one week intensive course for the Cultural Resource Management program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The course is entitled The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World, and as the title suggests, it explores the ever-shifting subject of social technologies and the ways they can be used in the museum world. The course looks at everything from blogging to YouTube and how this is slowly changing how museums approach Web development.

This is the second time I’ve taught this particular course, although in some ways it is a continuation of a similar one (the Web 1.0 version) that I first taught back in 2001. We usually have an interesting and international mix of participants. The course is geared for museum professionals and registration is open until December 22nd. The New Web runs from January 21 through 26, 2008. You can read more about the course on the UVIC website.

On Tuesday morning of this week, I showed a slide illustrating the growth of the museum blogosphere at the Association of Science-Technology Center’s annual conference. When I returned from the conference, I was surprised to find that the slide I had shown was already quite dated. My original slide, which I put together about 10 days ago, showed 211 blogs in Museum Blogs directory–today there are 233. We’ve received more than 20 new submissions to museum blogs in a little over a week.

At the Museums and the Web conference in April, I predicted that we would reach 200 museum blogs by the end of the year. It now appears that we might be closer to 300. The numbers are an indication that blogging in the museum world is becoming mainstream. It’s no longer about starting a blog, but rather using blogging tools to achieve various tasks. We’ve seen blogs that: support exhibits, help organize docents, share the museum Director’s vision, conduct direct marketing, re-publish articles from museum publications, help with professional development, explore specific topics or issues, as well as blogs that are used as simple content management systems inside existing sites.

It is also interesting to note that many institutions now run multiple blogs. While the Walker Art Center always has, the Smithsonian, St. Louis Science Center, Powerhouse Museum, Exploratorium, and many others now have more than one. Apparently blogging is contagious within institutions. Once tried, museums find other ways to use the technology.

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.

Yesterday, Webware (a CNET site) wrote a nice post on RSS Mixer: “RSS Mixer stacks up feeds.” They particularly liked the Apple Dashboard widget feature and the iPhone formated pages. They even built and embedded a Web widget in the article’s page. RSS Mixer also received mention in Widgets Lab. It’s been nice to see RSS Mixer get so much attention even in its fledgling prototype state.

The post mentions (as others have pointed out) that there is no way edit or manage user-created feeds, nor is there a search function. Thankfully, the author seems to understand that this is just a prototype. Over the last two weeks, we’ve been thinking about new features for this site, including searching and editing. If you have any suggestions, please send them our way. We’ll let you know what the next steps for the prototype are once we’ve decided.

Update (August 1, 2007): A couple of new reviews worth mentioning, one in WebInventif (France) and another in Abril.com (Brazil).