fresh + new(er)

Open Culture provides a withering examination of Google’s Knol project and in so doing draws out some of the strengths of the Wikipedia approach in terms of collaborative production.
In the discussion of the Knol project, Dan Colman speaks of some the fundamental shortcomings in the Knol approach, shortcomings that Wikipedia’s approach has been able to [...]

Beth Kanter and Rebecca Krause-Hardie have put together a good primer which appeared in Arts Reach magazine on some of the ways performing arts organisations are using social media to engage with their audiences in new ways.
Two things jumped out immediately. Firstly, that social media has seriously challenged the short-term marketing focus of many of [...]

Australian non-profit foundation Inspire has released a report on ICT usage amongst marginalised youth and health service providers.
Amongst many things it reveals that at least in the state of Victoria, a digital divide in terms of access is far less prevalent than is generally expected. Mirroring the findings of a lot of overseas research it [...]

Registrations have opened for the Social Media and Cultural Communication conference to be held in Sydney in February 2008. This conference is one of the outcomes of the Australian Research Council research project New Literacy, New Audiences which concludes shortly.
The conference brings together a range of great museum industry speakers from around Australia as well [...]

I’m excited to announce a new Powerhouse Museum blog - our Photo of the Day blog.
This blog is aimed at exposing some of the amazing photographic work that occurs at the Museum. Our Image Services team doesn’t just do object photography, scanning and image sales - they have a fantastically talented group of professional photographers [...]

Musuem blogs, even when they are one-directional (and have comments turned off), need to be measured differently. Jim Spadaccini and I wrote about this earlier in the year, but now with many many more museums blogging it is time for an update.
At the Powerhouse we’ve seen phenomenal growth in our blogs. This very blog, Fresh [...]

We’ve probably all heard of the Internet Refrigerator, but I’ve never really understood why you’d bother with one.
Last week my Chumby arrived (via a friend in San Francisco) and it is sitting in the kitchen alongside the tea. Although the Chumby is not the most versatile of devices, what I like about it is [...]

Over in the New Yorker is an excellent article on digitisation, the various book scanning projects, and a historical look at the urge to record and catalogue everything written by historian Anthony Grafton.
Here are some pull quotes of specific note -

Google’s OpenSocial has finally gone live.
What it provides for the museum sector is a much easier way to seed content to social networks, where apparently our younger online audiences, like to spend a lot of their time. OpenSocial, as opposed to a Facebook application, promises to work across multiple social networking services - meaning [...]

If you missed any of the recent conference presentations in Australia, the Powerhouse’s web technologies, strategy and expertise will be discussed/dissected/analysed at the following (public) events.
On Saturday December 1 at Focus Fest 2007 Agent Provocateurs I will be presenting under the theme ‘Provoking a shift in the dialogue:
Art audiences, galleries and the web’ which will [...]

During the recent school holidays we rolled out yet another simple game for young children over at our children’s website - Play at Powerhouse.
This one is called Counting with Zoe & Cogs. Like previous games on the Play at Powerhouse site it revolves around the Museum’s two children’s mascots - Zoe, a girl representing the [...]

The OCLC has released an enormous (~300 page) new report titled Sharing, privacy and trust in our networked world. It is essential reading.
Drawing data from 6 countries - USA, Canada, UK, Japan, France and Germany - the report gives detailed data on how people in the countries use the net, what they look at, [...]

Over the past while I’ve been talking a lot about museums becoming media organisations on the web. This is occurring at the same time as the differences between museums, libraries, galleries and archives blurring. Like media, museums are coming to terms with the need to encourage active participation and co-creation between our visitors (cf. readers/viewers), [...]

Back in April, Michael Wesch at Kansas State University made a great video about the basic ideas behind Web 2.0. Now he has delivered another video this time looking at information organisation. It opens with a traditional ‘on paper’ view of information in the pre-digital age - library card catalogues, expert taxonomies, and scarcity - [...]

I’ve been watching a lot of people using computers over the past few months and it struck me how many of them were using web-based email services - the more tech savvy were on Gmail, and the more casual users gravitated towards Hotmail and Yahoo Mail despite their flaws. An even smaller number used webmail [...]

Peter Brantley over at O’Reilly has put together a short post on his vision of the future of collections - specifically those held by university libraries - which should have resonance with those in collecting museums.

Another paper from the Steve researchers has gone online and is generating interesting discussions. It elaborates on the content of an earlier summary podcast. To be presented at ICHIM07 the paper describes some of the emerging patterns in tagging behaviour in the different interface trials.

Folksonomies, mashups, data visualisation, UCD, usability, experimentation?
I am excited to announce that we have two developer jobs going here in the Powerhouse Museum Web Services Unit. We are looking to fill two roles, one working specifically on the Collections Australia Network (CAN) project, and the other on a new experimental project called About NSW.
Both roles [...]

We’ve rolled out another simple game for young children over at our children’s website - Play at Powerhouse.
This one is called Zoe’s Dress Up Game and revolves around the Museum’s two children’s mascots - Zoe, a girl representing the local community, and Cogs, a robot that represents the Museum’s knowledge and collection. The game is [...]

Late in August OCLC held a special event called ‘Digitization matters: breaking through the barriers, scaling up digitization of special collections‘ in Chicago. The audio of the event is now available on the OCLC site and is important listening for museums trying to come to terms with mass digitisation and the new access demands of [...]

Compete is one of several comparative ISP anayltic services that are doing some interesting tracking of how US internet users are behaving on particular sites and comparing them with competitors. One of their recent reports examines how users are behaving once they are on Facebook. We all know

I first met Jean Burgess when she was writing about music subcultures and she has been a keen blogger and highly engaged in youth and their interaction with media.
Her PhD thesis, undertaken at QUT, is now available online and in it she explores the concept of ‘vernacular creativity’. Rather than seeing this as a ‘new’ [...]

Mike Ellis tipped me to Simon Wardley who recently presented at the Future of Web Apps in London. Whilst that particular presentation isn’t up as a video, Wardley’s slightly older but very similar in content, presentation from OSCON 2007 is.
In a brilliant and witty presentation Wardley, much in the vein of Nick Carr, explores how [...]

Web Directions South 07 was lots of fun and there were some great presentations over the two days. Unfortunately conferences are always full of choices and I missed several presentations I’d been looking forward to catching. That said, overall the quality was high and there were only a handful of dull moments. Most of the [...]

One of the biggest problems when designing and developing a new website or rolling out a new look and feel is cross-browser compatibility. Usually the solution has been to have a series of machines, real or virtual, with different versions of the various different browsers out there installed, and then go through each one laboriously.
Fortunately [...]