I filtered 90 responses by operating budget. Those with an annual operating budget of less than one million US dollars I’m considering small (29 responses), while large are those with a budget of more than a million (61 responses).

There are some interesting preliminary findings with respect to the number of computer-based interactive exhibits produced at these museums and their overall capacity to develop them.There is a dramatic difference in the number of computer-based interactive exhibits that small and large museums produce. More than half of small museums (56%) produce no electronic exhibits at all, while only 14% of respondents from large museums reported that their institutions produced no electronic exhibits. Interestingly, 20% of small museums produce computer-based exhibits in-house, a slightly larger percentage than large museums (18%). Most large museums (56%) use a combination of in-house and outside resources to develop computer-based exhibits, but only 18% of small museums use that combination of resources.

There were also some significant differences in small and large museums’ capacities to develop computer-based interactive exhibits. Most small museums rated their ability to produce computer-based interactive exhibits at either “no ability” (30%) or just one notch up the scale (30%). No representatives from small museums responded with a 6 or 7 (”very capable”). Those representing large museums, however, had more varied responses which were spread across our seven-point likert scale from “no ability” to “very capable.”

If you haven’t yet done so, please take the survey. We’re going to keep it open through May. It is open to museums, science centers, and other informal education venues of any size. We’ll share the complete results with you once the survey closes at the end of next month. If you’re headed to AAM, perhaps I will see you in Denver. You may also want to check out the complete AAM 2008 Media and Technology Committee Sponsored Program Schedule.

ExhibitFiles won the Best of the Web award in the museum professionals category. Congratulations to our partners the Association of Science-Technology Centers and Indepedent Exhibits, and to our advisors and the many members of the ExhibitFiles.

The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. won the Best of the Web award in the exhibition category which included over 40 nominees. Congratulations to everyone at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. The judges had great things to say about the project, you can view their comments on the conference forum.

You can learn more about the ExhibitFiles and The American Image in the Ideum portfolio.

As Emily mentioned in our last post, we are conducting this survey to support a grant proposal to fund Open Exhibits, a project that will allow us to research, develop, test, and disseminate open source exhibit software to museums.

As promised, we will share all of the survey results with those of you who have participated as soon as the survey is complete. We wanted to share a few preliminary findings that we thought were particularly interesting in the meantime.

So far, the results indicate that almost two thirds of electronic exhibits stay on the museum floor for more than 4 years. 40% of respondents selected “More than 5 years” when answering the question, “On average, how long does an electronic exhibit stay on the floor at your institution?” 8% selected “5 years” and another 16% selected “4 years.” The remaining responses were divided up between less than one year and up to three years.

55.9% of those who responded to the question, “Does your institution currently have Internet access in the public exhibit areas?” answered Yes. 26.5% answered No, and the remaining 17.6 % said Partial. These answers serve as a reminder that many museums are still struggling with basic Internet infrastructure issues. This feedback will likely inform our approach electronic exhibit development.

Obviously, these findings will become more valuable as we receive more responses. We really appreciate those of you who helped spread the word. Many thanks to following blogs for writing about Open Exhibits: Ancient World bloggers, Musematic, ExhibiTricks, Open Objects, and Museum 2.0.

Update: April 7, 2008 - We now have 73 responses to the survey.  Thanks to A Look at Art & Design for the survey mention.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I helped design and develop Jukebox Memories while working at the Exploratorium in the 90s. For that same exhibition, I helped develop another exhibit, A Memory Artist. The exhibition website is still up and is now, like the exhibit itself, nearly a decade old. You can check out the case study on the ExhibitFiles.

Earlier in the month, I had the opportunity to meet the VRMag Editorial Director Marco Trezzini in Lugano, Switzerland. (I taught a class at the University of Lugano as part of their TEC-CH Masters program.) It was great to finally have an opportunity to meet Marco and talk shop, as we’ve been in email contact for several years now. VRMag has covered our work since we got started back in 2000, along with the work of hundreds of other photographers and multimedia firms. VRMag and the VRWay site list dozens of feature stories and an extensive hotlist of panoramic images from around the world.

Update November 30th: BoingBoing (the #3 Blog in the world according to Technorati) has a post about VRMag, apparently John Gaeta “the Oscar-winning special effects guru behind The Matrix trilogy and the forthcoming Speed Racer film” has some very nice things to say about VRMag.

In the image above, the icon in the upper right is from a 400KB floppy disk. Hard disks were just starting to become available, but they were still very expensive.

All this brought back memories of the coolest early Macintosh I owned. (Yes, even cooler than the MacPlus.) It was an original Mac “clone” and one of the first Mac portables. It was called the Outback, and it was developed, as the name suggests, by a company in Australia.

The company basically ripped apart Mac SE computers and repackaged them in a portable format. The battery for the laptop was a standard camcorder battery. If I remember correctly, Apple eventually sued the makers of the Outback and won, and the Outback went out of business. Several years ago, I donated my Outback computer to the Obsolete Computer Museum. You can see the full-entry for this unique, portable computer here.

Years ago, I was lucky enough to participate in one of Bob’s famous “Light Walks.” You can see the online version for a description of the light walk, but it is only that - a description. For those who’ve participated, the light walk is a powerful experience and a Website hardly does it justice. While I don’t know how many people have been lucky enough to participate in this walk with Bob over the years, I was happy to see a post on the Exploratorium Explainers Blog talking about going on the light walk just last September.

Another blog post at Asymptotia, Remembering Bob Miller includes a great article about Bob Miller written by K.C. Cole. Bob Miller will be missed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).