Well the cat is out of the bag and I’m one of the fifteen members of the Government 2.0 Taskforce! And I’m excited by the possibilities.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make it down to Canberra for the launch at Publicsphere2 but I “watched it live on Twitter“.
So what is the Taskforce doing?
Its work falls into two [...]
The (Australian) Govt 2.0 Taskforce – introduction and initial thoughts
June 26th, 2009 8 Comments
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1000th Tyrrell image in the Commons (1265 released in total)
June 4th, 2009 2 Comments
(Bayswater Rd, Darlinghurst, circa 1900)
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(Same location today-ish)
Today we released 24 more images into our pool in the Commons on Flickr. That wouldn’t be such a milestone – we release more each week – but we’ve finally released the 1000th image from the Tyrrell photographic collection.
We’ve now got 1,265 of our images out there [...]
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Twitter information for your users – good practice from Mosman Municipal Council
May 18th, 2009 1 Comment
Mosman Council has been doing some great stuff with social media and today Laurel Papworth pointed out their ‘Twitter policy’ that is on their website. They are one of the exemplars of local government social media in Australia – despite being a local government area with a higher-than-average older demographic.
Their information page about the [...]
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Fiddling with Wolfram Alpha
May 16th, 2009 2 Comments
Well, Wolfram Alpha is another nail in the coffin of the value of ‘raw data’ on the internet. And another reason why museums (and everyone else) need to emphasise interpretation, value add, and the ‘experience’ (Max Anderson’s ‘the visceral’). The raw materials will increasingly be free, easy to find, and ready for recombination and building [...]
Tags: Search
MW2009 Clouds, Switches, APIs, Geolocation and Galleries – a shoddy summary
April 27th, 2009 4 Comments
(Disclaimer – this is a rushed post cobbled together from equally rushed notes!)
Like most years, this year’s Museums and the Web (MW2009) was all about the people. Catching up with people, putting faces to names, and having heated discussions in a revolving restaurant atop the conference venue in Indianapolis. The value of face to face [...]
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Another OPAC discovery – the Gambey dip circle (or the value of minimal tombstone data)
April 27th, 2009 3 Comments
New discoveries as a result of putting our incomplete collection database online are pretty common place – almost every week we are advised of corrections – but here’s another lovely story of an object whose provenance has been significantly enhanced by a member of the public. … If your organisation is still having doubts about the value of making available un-edited, un-verified, ageing tombstone data then it is worth showing examples like these.
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Intgerating Twitter tweets into blog comments
April 12th, 2009 3 Comments
Backtype has just released the very first 0.1 version of a Wordpress plugin that integrates tweets and retweets as well as comments on other blogs into the comment stream of your original Wordpress posts.
I’ve been trialling an install and you can see it in action on a post like this one. Notice that the tweets [...]
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A quick QR code update
April 8th, 2009 11 Comments
As regular readers know, we’ve been trialling QR codes and a little while back rolled them on a small selection of object labels in a Japanese fashion display.
I’ve been keep an eye on their usage and some of the continuing problems around lighting, shadows, and low-resolution mobile phone cameras like the current iPhone 3G. So [...]
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One year in the Commons on Flickr – statistics and . . . a book!
April 8th, 2009 4 Comments
Today we celebrate one year in the Commons on Flickr.
Since April 8 last year we’ve uploaded 1,171 photos (382 geotagged) from four different archival photographic collections. These have been viewed 777,466 times! For photographs that had been either hidden away on our website (the original 270 Tyrrell photographs on our website were viewed around [...]
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Impact of the Commons on image sales at the Powerhouse
April 7th, 2009 4 Comments
As many readers know, Paula Bray, our manager of Visual and Digitisation Services, has been working on a paper for Museums and the Web looking at the impact of the Commons on Flickr on our image sales business.
Paula’s paper has been published over at Archimuse and if you are going to be in Indianapolis next [...]
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Powerhouse Object of the Week – a new behind the scenes blog
April 2nd, 2009 2 Comments
Another exciting thing we are launching today is our Object of the Week blog. It nicely complements our Photo of the Day which recently celebrated 500 posts!
We kick off Object of the Week with a profile of the project lead, curator Erika Dicker. Erika has chosen a favourite object from the collection – a prawn [...]
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Powerhouse collection documentation goes Creative Commons
April 2nd, 2009 22 Comments
We’re happy to announce that as of today all our online collection documentation is available under a mix of Creative Commons licenses. We’ve been considering this for a long time but the most recent driver was the Wikipedia Backstage tour.
Collection records are now split into two main blocks of text.
The first section is the relatively [...]
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Working with Wikipedia – Backstage Pass at the Powerhouse Museum
April 2nd, 2009 7 Comments
I like the notion that Noam Cohen raises in his recent New York Times article where Wikipedia is compared to a city.
It is this sidewalk-like transparency and collective responsibility that makes Wikipedia as accurate as it is. The greater the foot traffic, the safer the neighbourhood. Thus, oddly enough, the more popular, even controversial, an [...]
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500 posts on Powerhouse Photo of the Day! Win a print!
March 27th, 2009 Comments Off
Today our Photo of the Day blog is celebrating 500 posts!
There is a little prize of ‘a print of your choice’ going for the best suggestion or comment on the Photo of the Day for the next 500 posts.
The blog has been a great success for the Museum over the past 500 days and has [...]
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Crosspost – Powerhouse seeks C64!
March 9th, 2009 1 Comment
If you were like me and grew up with a Commodore 64 as your introduction to the world of programming and hacking then this is for you.
Over on our 80s exhibition blog a call has gone out.
We are seeking one or more C64s and games! We are looking for old C64s with an interesting provenance [...]
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ROI Revolution’s Google Analytics Report Enhancer
March 5th, 2009 Comments Off
Anyone who attended my double web analytics workshops today at the Transforming Cultural and Scientific Communication conference in Melbourne today saw this lovely little Greasemonkey script in action.
And I thought I better link it for everyone who is not already using this to install.
What GARE does, amongst other things is go some way towards addressing [...]
Tags: tscs
QR codes in the museum – problems and opportunities with extended object labels
March 5th, 2009 21 Comments
I think QR codes have a lot of potential – potential that hitherto has not been realised. The underwhelming uptake of the codes outside of Japan has a lot to do with the poor quality marketing campaigns so far run with them. If I am going to have to install or worse still, find on [...]
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Readability – reducing clutter with a bookmarklet
March 4th, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve become a fan of a bookmarklet tool called Readability.
What it does is remove the clutter from a content-rich webpage and optimise it for ‘readability’ (which of course, itself can be customised). Now museums tend to be serial offenders on text-heaviness – we love long text and I’m not one to argue that we should [...]
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We are (partially) mobile – Powerhouse on your phone
February 28th, 2009 4 Comments
Today we went live with a mobile version of the Powerhouse Museum site. Open up http://www.powerhousemuseum.com on your phone browser and you’ll see a stripped back version of the site with the bare necessities and a slimmed down architecture.
It is a still a work in progress – we’ve been greatly impressed with how SFMOMA incorporated [...]
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Twitter and upcoming presentations and workshops
February 24th, 2009 3 Comments
As many of you know I’ve got a large number of workshops and presentations coming up.
Next week I’m speaking at the State Library of NSW’s Perceptions and Connections conference then later in the week running two workshops on metrics and giving a presentation at the Transformations in Cultural and Scientific Communication conference in Melbourne. A [...]
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Mapping your social network
February 24th, 2009 Comments Off
What you see above is a map of my Facebook friends and their interconnections. The core mesh shows the tight interlinking of my social friends who I went to university with or are involved in some way in musical pursuits. The smaller, less dense cluster to the right are my ‘museum tech’ acquaintances – drawn [...]
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Sydney Observatory and astrometry bots
February 22nd, 2009 1 Comment
Over at the Sydney Observatory blog you can read about our astronomy curator’s experiments with the ‘astrotagging bot’ behind the Astrometry project and group on Flickr.
Today 20 February 2009 (Sydney time) the above image and five others were posted on the image sharing website Flickr here. Within a few minutes astrometry.net found the image and [...]
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The Powerhouse Museum library now blogs
February 22nd, 2009 1 Comment
Another thing I’ve neglected to mention is that our Research Library now has a blog. They are the fourth internal unit to blog publicly about their day to day work (joining our Image Services and Photography team, Conservation team, and of course the Digital group – which you are reading now).
The Library is home to [...]
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Attempts at quantifying social behaviour in the Commons
February 22nd, 2009 Comments Off
Over at the fantastic Indicommons blog there has been a flurry of activity around generating data from the various collections in the Commons on Flickr.
Patrick Peccatte initially posted on his blog a set of figures extracted using the Flickr API across the institutions in the Commons. Patrick has reworked these figures a little and they’ve [...]
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Engaging audiences with exhibitions in early development – Signs and the 1980s
February 13th, 2009 2 Comments
Much like other museums we’ve started in earnest committing to engaging collaborators in exhibitions from the earliest stages possible. Our next two big(-ish) exhibitions are using different methods to collate, curate, and select content and ideas.
Our upcoming exhibition on Signs which will open around the time of Sydney Design 09 in August has just launched [...]
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