fresh + new(er)

Dan Hill from Arup and the author of the wonderful City of Sound blog wrote a review of the Powerhouse’s Modern Times exhibition. In his criticism of the exhibition he wondered where the extra-exhibition content was - especially given the perfect fit between the content of the exhibition and specific places and sites. He describes [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the really wild things at Museums and the Web 2007 was a demonstration booth from the National Science Museum, Japan. At the booth were a series of paper pop up dinosaurs. By themselves the dinosaur popups were impressive but once a consumer grade webcam was pointed at the paper cutouts they came to [...]

It shouldn’t take much imagination to see the enormous potential afforded by this prototype project coming out of Germany via Japan - Enkin.
Built on Google’s Android mobile platform (for which, it should be pointed out, no commercially available devices exist), Enkin looks amazing, even as a prototype. David Bearman has written recently about the [...]

There is a lot to learn from the Science Museum’s (London) recent success with their Launchball online game.
The project has been enormously successful and recently won ‘best of show’ at SxSW. I conducted an interview with Daniel Evans, Frankie Roberto, and Mike Ellis to explore some of the ideas and processes behind the project.
Launchball was [...]

Last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art launched their Dashboard - a visual display of various data about the museum and its activities. Updated regularly the Dashboard gives open public access to much data that would usually be buried deep in an annual report.
The ‘transparency’ that the Dashboard offers is remarkable - it not only [...]

The Science Museum’s Launchball has just taken out ‘best of show‘ at South by Southwest.
That a museum website interactive could possibly take out that award is truly remarkable and a testament to the Science Museum’s web team. I can’t think on another example where a cultural organisation has had the nouse to make a game [...]

Some readers may know that I and several members of my team are hard at work on a range of location-centric cultural sector data applications. We have been combining data sources from across the sector and government and building new ways of traversing very diverse data sets. (If you are going to be at Museums [...]

I ordered an OLPC laptop under the ‘Give One Get One’ programme and via a friend in the US it arrived last week. My 3 year old has been having a great time playing with the TamTam Mini application, a very simple graphical sound triggering noise maker; the Paint application; a memory match game; and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Two weeks ago we made a simple ABC book for young children available on our children’s website. It is called ‘C is for collection‘ and is a very basic extension of our online collection built in Flash with an XML file supplying the necessary collection data allowing for easy expansion.
A longer term objective of [...]

Everyone is buzzing about the new features that have popped up with the easily embeddable GoogleMaps today. This is a big step towards making map mashups completely mainstream - increasing the popular acceptance of the map as a user interface.
For a look at how things might work for the museum and cultural sector take [...]

From Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng comes an interesting academic paper titled Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities.
Following my recent post looking at diffused brand identity in social media, this paper is a useful examination of the emergent ‘authority’ and ‘connectedness’ of users amongst a dataset of 75,000 [...]

As I have been thinking about my upcoming presentation at Web Directions South there have been a lot of interesting maneuvers out in the commercial web space.
First, a while back Facebook opened their platform to developers allowing content from other providers to interact with Facebook profiles in Facebook. This, coupled with the enormous media [...]

We are very lucky to have within our museum a pair of media production labs - SoundHouse VectorLab - where the public can do short, low cost courses in video and music production. A spinoff of these facilities is a series of digital storytelling projects. Usually these projects are run in regional and rural communities [...]

Smashing Magazine has put together a fantastic round up of a lot of very nice data visualisation sites and approaches. There’s a lot covered, plenty of links to explore, and much to inspire those of us dealing with huge amounts of otherwise impenetrable data in our collections.

Human Brain Cloud is a pretty amusing timewaster with a great visualisation interface, and lots of (untapped) potential for tagging applications.
HBC asks everyone online to ‘free associate’ with particular words which then have relationships built between them. Much like what we at the Powerhouse do when we data-mine search terms, HBC is building an enormous [...]

Internet Archive/Open Content Allinace has launched a public demo of its forthcoming Open Library project. Having heard Brewster Kahle speak about the OCA at Museums and the Web 2007, it is fantastic to be finally able to get some hands-on time with the work he was talking about.
Open Library is a very exciting project because [...]