The Powerhouse is coming up to the 2nd anniversary of our joining the Commons on Flickr. Back when we joined there was only the Library of Congress and we trusted that we were making the correct decision back then. (I’ll be blogging an interview with Paula Bray around the time of the anniversary.)
A lot has [...]
Entries Tagged as 'User experience'
Why Flickr Commons? (and why Wikimedia Commons is very different)
January 25th, 2010 7 Comments
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“Let’s make more crowns”, or, the danger of not looking closely at your web metrics
January 9th, 2010 10 Comments
Happy new year everyone.
I’ve got a bit of a backlog of posts but there is an ulterior motive for getting this out the door – and, well, it has been more than 18 months since I should have written about this.
Over on our children’s website – Play at Powerhouse – we have a lot [...]
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The 2 in 100 who might matter most – your core web audience
December 4th, 2009 8 Comments
As some of you know I’ve been doing a series of deep dive web metrics workshops for various institutions around the world in the last couple of months and one thing I’ve been interested in is estimating the size of a ‘core museum website audience’.
Whilst we all like the big figures of casual visitors [...]
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Five rules for museum content (via Amsterdam)
October 29th, 2009 9 Comments
I’m just back from presenting at the New Museum Lab event in Amsterdam run by the Nationaal Historisch Museum. My talk was titled ‘Digital Effects: Content, Communities and the Museum DNA’ and whilst I won’t be publishing the slides, one thing that seemed to be of interest to a lot of people was this simple [...]
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Multi-lingual machine translation from the footer
October 12th, 2009 7 Comments
There’s been a fair bit of chatter about machine translation of late and so when we noticed that the Museum of London team had rolled out the new Google Translate widget on their website we figured we’d give it a try and follow suit.
So lo and behold, now on the Powerhouse Museum main site you [...]
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Will schools use collection content? The Learning Federation Pilot Report
July 15th, 2009 1 Comment
Over the last 12 months the Powerhouse, along with the National Museum of Australia and Museum Victoria, has been involved in supplying collection data to joint pilot project between the Le@rning Federation (TLF) and the Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) from March 2008 to May 2009
Museums have always had difficulty preparing material to service [...]
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Fictitional narratives & visitor-made labels – The Odditoreum
July 9th, 2009 6 Comments
At the Powerhouse we’ve just launched something called The Odditoreum. An incredibly low-tech “exhibition” with no technology-based interactive experiences and minimal web presence, The Odditoreum feels remarkable for the level of participation it is engendering. Visitors are actively writing their own labels for the objects and even before launch there was a lot of interest [...]
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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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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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Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination opens and is immediately on the web
December 3rd, 2008 3 Comments
Tonight we had the official public opening of Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination.
Already images and videos of the exhibition and the launch, taken by members of the public (“the people formerly known as the audience”) are starting to appear online across the social web.
Here’s photos on Flickr and no doubt tomorrow there will be [...]
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