fresh + new(er)

OK so here’s the deal - the Umbilical Brothers have helped us create six different short TV advertisements for the upcoming Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination exhibition.
One of these is already screening in cinemas (see below). But now we need your help in voting for the next advertisement. We can only make one [...]

Mozilla Labs has released Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity in an early alpha form. This is a glimpse into a future world of browser technology which brings notions of the semantic web directly into the browser and connects the dots between websites - not from a provider perspective, but from a user perspective.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza [...]

A week or so ago Paul Hagon got in touch with me to say he’d done something really cool with our geo-coded historical images in the Commons on Flickr. In what he describes as “about 30 minutes of coding” he had taken a KML feed from our Tyrrell photos in the Commons on Flickr and [...]

Flickr has recently enabled the embedding of slideshows which means doing something like this is now really really easy. And you can even go full screen.

As you’ve heard, we’ve been working on a whole lot of new projects. And with new projects comes new code. I can’t say a lot more about these projects right now, but we’ve been using Python and the Django framework to develop them. So here’s the first of the spinoff products that we’re putting out [...]

Our Baby Names Explorer has been getting a lot of use and some of you might be interested in knowing about a few of the ‘hidden features’.
Here’s some useful ones which use the RegEx structure:
Comparing two names - enter ‘/(name)|(name)’ to compare. For example ‘/(michael)|(john)’ will show the popularity of both michael and john on [...]

It has been quite a long time coming but finally our NSW Baby Names Explorer has gone live as part of the relaunched NSW Government portal. This is the first publicly visible application developed out of a cross-government project that parts of the Powerhouse team are working on.
The application was built in Adobe Flex to [...]

Last year there was a lot of buzz around the first demos on Microsoft’s Seadragon and Photosynth, now from SIGGRAPH08 comes this rather splendid update to underlying technologies and concepts.

There is now a lot more ability for users to navigate and tweak their experience of interacting and browsing a 3D scene using miscellaneous 2D [...]

Knowing your audience is critical yet being outside of North America often means that we end up justifying projects, strategies, methodologies on general audience data drawn from another continent.
The CCI at QUT has just published the latest ‘Digital Futures Report - the Internet in Australia‘ which is a very comprehensive look at how Australian internet [...]

Last week we started another experiment on Flickr.
At the moment we have an exhibition, Modern Times, which is about modernism in Australia. The exhibition is a quite spectacular mix of objects - including a lovely set of milkbar seats to sit on (!!) - and ends with a triple projector immersive audio-visual experience produced by [...]

We’ve kept this quiet so far but along with the start of the Sydney Design 08 campaign the Museum launched a small Facebook presence. Importantly this presence is managed as a joint effort between the Museum’s Marketing Department and the Web Services Unit, rather than just being a web project.
Sydney Design has a profile as [...]

I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded Wordpress and at the same time changed themes, upgraded plugins etc. And, bar a few fiddly errors, it went pretty smoothly. One word of advice for others lagging on really old versions of Wordpress - take the time to upgrade version numbers one at a time (major stable version [...]

As the team has been working on a large array of new projects and sites of late we’ve been exploring some of the newer tools that have emerged for usability testing and ensuring good information architectures. Here’s some of what we’ve been exploring and using -
We’ve started using Optimalsort for site architecture - especially [...]

I’ve got some new presentations and workshops coming up over the next few months. The team has been working on some great projects which all will start going public soon - some of which have had a greater level of hush hush than would usually be the case. So in some of these presentations the [...]

The Powerhouse Museum has gone live with its first public experiment with QR codes.
QR codes are really glorified barcodes with the capacity to hold far more information than a standard barcode. Because of the prevalence of mobile phone cameras and the desire of telcos to drive data usage on mobiles, QR codes are getting a [...]

Today we completed the circle.
We have started presenting the tags that Flickr users have left on our images in the Commons on Flickr in their associated collection records in our online collection database. What this means is that the large number of tags added to our photographic collection in Flickr now are available in our [...]

The first three months of having images from the Tyrrell Photographic Collection in the Commons on Flickr have been very interesting. We launched on April 8 with 200 images and have been adding more each week since.
At the 12 week mark we had 600 photos uploaded, mostly location photography with just under 50% geocoded. [...]

It has been an interesting day down in Melbourne brainstorming many of the technologies that might impact on the higher education sector in the next 5 years. This brainstorming is forming the basis of the upcoming Horizon.Au Report - a version of the Horizon Report tailored specifically for the Australian and New Zealand community.
The North [...]

We’re all working hard to ensure that our own content is identified with persistent URLs - a referrer that will stand the test of time - but often when we are writing a paper we need to refer to someone else’s URL, most of which are not designed to be permanent.
Traditionally when we reference something [...]

Lorcan Dempsey pointed to this rather excellent presentation titled ‘There’s No Place Like Home?’ from Ann Cameron at the National Library of Scotland. In it she describes way that the NLS has been uploading archival video materials to YouTube and highlights some of the issues around Copyright, and metadata that have emerged from the project. [...]

Whilst we are collating the data to report on the Museum’s first three months in the Commons on Flickr, I’ll share one of the best stories to come from the project for us so far - the story of finding the Mosman Bay Falls.
Amongst our photographs we found two images simply titled ‘Mosman Bay [...]

Here’s the second of a set of notes scribed during the main sessions of the CCI’s conference ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce‘.
Camilla Cooke was the strategist behind the Kevin07 digital campaign in what she described as ‘Australia’s first digital election’. In a fantastic presentation she went through the rationale behind the digital elements of [...]

I’ve been in Brisbane the last few days - presenting the Powerhouse Museum’s Creative Commons and public domain projects and also managed attend one day of the CCI’s conference ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce‘. In amongst some truly awful examples of how not to use Powerpoint, there were some interesting presentations and papers.
Here’s [...]

Google Trends has started to allow domain level searches. This means that you can now pull up rough traffic figures, as calculated by Google, on any top level domain (subdomains like play.powerhousemuseum.com or artgallery.nsw.gov.au won’t work), and compare them to others. This moves Google Trends into territory covered by services like Compete, Quantcast (both US-centric) [...]

Chris Sizemore at the BBC’s Radio Labs demonstrates an experiment in automated metadata, much akin to Open Calais.
Sizemore has taken Wikipedia and has built a simple web application that uses Wikipedia to disambiguate entities in a block of text and suggest broad categories for the content. Because Wikipedia has broad coverage of topics and deep [...]