Month: May 2010

Categories
Conferences and event reports

Upcoming talks: Sydney, Taipei, Canberra, London, Albury

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!

TedX Sydney ushers in a two month period of endless talking.

In mid June I’ll be doing a public talk on June 10 in Taipei at Fu Jen Catholic University as part of a series of workshops I’m running in Taiwan.

Switching to Government 2.0 matters – using the publicly funded cultural sector as a testbed – I’ll be speaking at the National Public Sector Digital Media Forum in Canberra on June 23, closely followed by the Web 2.0 in Government 2.0 in Sydney on June 24. And, the next day, June 25, I’ll be speculating about ‘What Now?’ at the Fastbreak breakfast at the Powerhouse Museum.

Following that I’m delivering a keynote at EVA London 2010 on July 5, and at the Public Libraries Impact 2010 conference in Albury on July 15.

And if semantic web and metadata are your thing, two other Powerhouse digital folks – Ingrid Mason, CAN Project Manager and Luke Dearnley, Web Manager, will be presenting at Metadata Australia 2010 next week in Canberra.

Categories
Mobile QR codes

Shortened URLs as an alternative to QR codes

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 on how these go.

My gut feeling is that these get around the application requirements and the scanning and light issues of QR codes – and whilst they may not attract ‘curious’ visitors, they should be obvious enough for those visitors who really do want to ‘know more’.

Categories
General Museum blogging

Fresh & New(er) is 5 years old!

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 it became properly ‘public facing’. It was the first Powerhouse blog which was followed in 2006 by the Sydney Observatory blog.

Now, 5 years on, Fresh & New(er) is one of the top ten most popular parts of the Powerhouse Museum website attracting a wide global audience.

I had a look at some of the early posts and it seems that even back then we were concerning ourselves with mobiles, Copyright, open licensing and new models of interactivity.

Some things never change.

I wonder where we will be in 5 years time (and, more importantly, where we hid the party bags!).