Everyone is doing apps. It might not be the decision of choice for us ‘web people’ – our friends at the Brooklyn have recently agonised over similar decisions – but in the end actual user behaviour wins out in the short term over what we might consider best practice. (Of course, modelling on actual user [...]
Malcolm Tredinnick on some problems with working with our collection dataset
July 5th, 2010 No Comments
Down at the recent Pycon we were excited to hear that Malcolm Tredinnick had taken the downloadable collection dataset from the Powerhouse and was using it to demonstrate some of the issues with working with (semi-)open datasets. His presentation reveals what every museum knows – the datasets that exist in our collection databases are inherently [...]
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A little mobile data
June 20th, 2010 3 Comments
I’m a last minute addition to an AIMIA forum on Tuesday morning looking at the Digital Customer Experience. The forum is focussing primarily on mobile. In prepping the slides looking at in-museum and out-museum mobile experiences, I’ve dug up a little data that you may be intrigued by. If anything it reflects the type of [...]
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New jobs – come work with us!
June 11th, 2010 3 Comments
The Powerhouse Web & Social Technologies Unit has some exciting new projects coming up and we are recruiting a few new temporary positions to help us do this work. For those with cataloguing and museum collection skills we have two temporary data analyst roles on offer. These will require a bit of national travelling and [...]
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Upcoming talks: Sydney, Taipei, Canberra, London, Albury
May 21st, 2010 No Comments
Tomorrow I’m speaking at TedX Sydney at Carriageworks. Unsurprisingly this has turned out to be a massive event and is now being webcast live on the ABC. There’s an invited audience in the auditorium but the foyer space is simulcasting live along with Q&A sessions and extra performances – it is free to come along! [...]
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Shortened URLs as an alternative to QR codes
May 3rd, 2010 9 Comments
The first time we did something with QR codes at the Powerhouse was in 2008 during Sydney Design festival. Last year we experimented with them on object labels with mixed results. Now for our latest fashion exhibition, Frock Stars, we’ve replaced QR codes on labels with our new shortened URLs. We’ll be keeping an eye [...]
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Fresh & New(er) is 5 years old!
May 1st, 2010 5 Comments
Fresh & New(er) has just turned 5! This blog started back in May 2005 as a storehouse of all the links and commentary that the Powerhouse web team of the time used to send around via email. It wasn’t until one of the posts got picked up and commented on by some enthusiastic educators that [...]
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Tracking what gets ‘used’
April 30th, 2010 3 Comments
Theres been a fair bit of excitement around the traps today about the revealing of Amazon’s tracking of highlighting on their Kindle devices. In fact this sort of interaction tracking has been going on on the web for quite a while – but the Kindle example is one of the first where this data is [...]
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Short report on Museums and the Web 2010, Denver
April 27th, 2010 1 Comment
Denver is a very high altitude city. One mile up, many of the conference attendees suffered from altitude sickness – especially those who had flown directly into such a high altitude. This year’s conference was slightly different to previous years. Session formats had changed ever so slightly and the conference venue had had to split [...]
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First impression of the iPad (and museum possibilities)
April 26th, 2010 3 Comments
Here’s something I wrote about the iPad on the flight back from Museums and the Web 2010. I promise a full conference rundown later. – I’ve just spent about 24 hours sitting in a confined airline seat playing with an iPad. I picked up one in New York on the day before flying out and [...]
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