As we mentioned in posts earlier this year, we’ve written and have now submitted a proposal with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) to fund an open source initiative to develop software for computer-based interactive exhibits.  Our preliminary Website for the Open Exhibits project is now available at openexhibits.org.  The new site contains a screencast introducing the project along with a description of this planned project.

Also on the Open Exhibits site, you’ll  find results from the survey we conducted in April and May of this year. We had a total of 125 responses from 110 museums.  The survey results can be filtered by small and large museums, as well as informal science institutions.  You’ll also find  links to our Facebook group, YouTube page, and Flickr presence.   Please join us on these sites and we’ll keep you up-to-date as we  (hopefully) start this new initiative.

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.

A new and improved version of  KQED’s QUEST Website, which we helped to develop, is now live. QUEST is an ambitious project utilizing all of KQED’s platforms to not only broadcast science and nature programming, but to also build a community supporting further exploration in the area. Ideum worked with KQED to design a website promoting community participation via an interactive mashup-driven website.

The most recent version of QUEST includes a number of improvements intended to simplify the navigation of the site’s ever-expanding content. With nearly 100 television broadcasts and around 65 online radio broadcasts, the initial sort features (time based) became difficult to use. The radio/television tab can now be filtered by topic and type and the main map features the latest five items instead of search features.

You’ll also notice that blog posts are now displayed as items on the main site’s map - a feature we were able to implement using data from the geopress plugin for WordPress. This feature means that all of KQED’s great content can now be available within the Google Map Mashup. Since the purpose of KQED QUEST is to explore “the stories behind Bay Area science, nature and environmental issues,” this addition makes perfect sense. Take a look at the KQED site or check out  KQED Quest in our portfolio to learn more.

After toying with the idea of a public alpha, we’ve decided to keep RSS Mixer private for now. We’re still working through issues concerning performance and scalability — even with a modest number of feeds (we currently have 11,169), we’ve handled as many as 3 million posts.

Just last week, we moved the alpha server over to a new host. We’re now using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This will help us serve many visitors (if they come), but we are still sorting out some of the database issues that come with a system that contains millions of records. If you’d like an invite to the private alpha, please send us an email: rssmixer [at] ideum.com. We just ask that you are willing to share some feedback about the site. We’ll be posting a launch update in March.

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.