Category: General

Interesting think piece by Nick Carr on energy waste and computing and the coming environmental factors that will lead to an age of ‘frugal computing’.

Prickett Morgan calculates that, including secondary air-conditioning costs, the world’s PCs and servers eat up 2.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy every year, which, at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, amounts to “$250 billion in hard, cold cash a year. Assuming that a server or PC is only used to do real work about 15 percent of the time, that means about $213 billion of that was absolutely wasted. If you were fair and added in the cost of coal mining, nuclear power plant maintenance and disposal of nuc

Here are the presentation slides from the ScreenSpeak Seminar at the Powerhouse Museum on the 6th May 2006.

They are licensed under Creative Commons.

Audio recordings of the talk : Part 1 | Part 2

Wikis, Blogs and the New World Order:

The produser, the digital native and the new tools of ‘text’.

 by Mike Jones

The internet is more than just an electronic library…! The form and function of the The Net expounds a very new sensibility of not only how to source and read a text, but also fundamentally changes our perspective on the creation of texts. This presentation will focus on two emerging textual/creative forms unique to the internet – Blogs and Wikis – and explore how these forms are created and function as proactive and collaborative constructs. The practicalities of using and creating Blogs and Wikis and their potential role in the classroom also allows for the consideration of new ideas about learning engagement, and the nature of the connections young people, as Digital Natives, form with digital texts.

Interesting article on this year’s design trends.

http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/STEPMagazine/Article/28586

The winners at Museums & The Web 2006 have been announced.

Congratulations to all, especially to our friends at the Australian Museum who picked up an honourable mention in the Best Research Site category for the Birds In Backyards site.

There are MANY lessons to be learnt from the winning sites and I’d encourage everyone in our teams to check them out thoroughly and post your own evaluative comments about each of the winning sites. These sites are relevant for everyone in our area, not just us web folk.

Kevin Sumption’s paper on the ‘ubiquitous museum’ is online too and is a good overview of where he sees museums (including ours) need to move.

Here’s my reactions to the Best of the Web 2006 winners.

Overall there seems to have been a big shift towards ‘users’. The language on every site and project has shifted towards emphasising interaction and the ‘you’. eg. What do YOU want to do?, Tell us YOUR experiences/memories etc.

And it is not only superficial. Some sites are moving towards real multidirectional communication – not just one/two-way between museum and user but also encouraging ‘between user’ communication.

Whilst there is still some superfluous Flash use it is really pleasing to see sites beginning to move away from Flash for the sake of it and looking at responding to user needs rather than simply providing pretty slideshows and unnecesary visual navigation. The LA Conservancy’s Curating The City site is a good example of where Flash makes it very pretty but also makes it unnecessarily complicated to get to what is basically a tracking of historical changes along the Wiltshire Boulevard. The nav is slow to load and processor intensive. Why? Aesthetics over use. The best part is the ability of users to upload their own stories about places but in my mind this feature is too buried and should be the primary focus of the site instead – see the highly popular community memory projects like Mumur in Canada from Habitat (and spinoffs) for comparison.

On the otherhand there are times when I wanted MORE aesthetics. The Canadian educational site on mining cutely called ‘Life Of A Rock Star’ does have great content but it seems so, well, late 90s in design. Maybe that’s what makes it such a good educational site – it targets low end computers and doesn’t frighten low tech teachers. I’m not sure.

Science Buzz – Designwise this site pretty much nails the audience. It is SO 2.0 it is not funny – the font choice, rounded corners, boxes, colour schemes – FontShop would have a field day. But its not just pretty ‘now’ graphics, they’ve deeply integrated a lot of the ideas of social software and it seems to be working – comments, polls, etc all seems to be being used by actual visitors. This is a good site to keep in the back of our minds when we start building our upcoming ‘childrens’ portal/site.

Search-wise the New York Public Libary’s Digital Gallery is fantastic. They’ve implemented the ‘search history’ that we are using for our own OPAC 2.0 and Design Hub, and the interface is so intuitive. Obviously they have some very rich data to mine which helps.

Like the Australian Museum’s Birds In Backyards site – it too has really rich data to draw on. The site design is neat and clean, fast and again, nails the target audience. The survey form checkbox navigation is cute.

http://www.mothergooserocks.com/headandshoulders.html

Mother Goose Rocks! is the creation of writer/director Richard Snee, based upon his stage play “Musical Mother Goose.” Hundreds of thousands of CDs have been sold worldwide and “Wheels On the Bus,” from Mother Goose Rocks! Volume 3, even landed on the British pop music charts in 2002 and was featured on the television show “Top of the Pops.” Mother Goose Rocks! music has also been featured in the U.S. television soap opera, “Guiding Light.” (We’re not sure why, but it was still an honor).

Mother Goose Rocks! Top 20 Music Video Countdown DVD, marks the first DVD release in this series. The music video cartoons are based on the award-winning Mother Goose Rocks! internet animations that have been enjoyed by young children, their parents, siblings and caregivers for over 4 years.

Thanks Michi for putting me onto this little beauty!