Another fantastic blog I’ve been reading voraciously is Creating Passionate Users. There is some great reading here particularly on usability but also on creating stimulating creative work environments.
Category: Interactive Media
Categories
ABC’s Digital Futures Blog
Apologies for the lack of recent updates. Plenty to hopefully come this week.
A local blog worth reading is from ABC Digital Futures. The ABC is our national public broadcaster, and they are in the process of migrating from from a old world media organisation to one that hopefully fully embraces the opportunities of the new digital media world. I’ve spoken quite a bit about the rather unique position organisations like the ABC are in and that they have the ability to leverage their position much in the way that the BBC has done seemingly so effectively.
The ABC Digital Futures blog follows and reports on an internal conference held at the ABC and covers many of the same issues and fields that are effecting museums and galleries particularly as we (the museums and galleries) start to operate in the digital realm more like niche media organisations ourselves.
10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website is essential reading.
Another week and another set of new features are now live on our Collection search.
While most local readers of the blog were at Web Directions South (congratulations to Museum Victoria for taking out the Web Excellence award – perhaps the most strict clean code award around!), we’ve been working to get two key new features out on the search.
The first is publicly visible and is an exhibition location field. This now allows users to see the exhibition in which objects that are on public display are in. This will, in the next few weeks, operate in the reverse as well, allowing visitors to each exhibition microsite to quickly view a list of collection objects on display within the exhibition, and pull up more details on each. Filtering by only objects on display is coming soon too.
Examples (scroll to bottom of object record to see the change) –
+ Shou Lao figure on display in Other Histories
+ ‘Wiggle Chair’ by Frank Gehry on display in Inspired
The second key feature is an internal backend tool which allows querying of search terms by object. This queries the ever-growing database of search terms and object views and allows us to quickly examine, by object, the terms used to discover it. This is the start of an internal visualisation project looking at ways of displaying, and more importantly, revealing patterns in the search data.
(Remember, too, all this data is anonymous. We do not gather any identifying data and these terms are not correlated against IP addresses. There is no need for us to do this – the anonymous data provides enough to assist other users discover and browse.)
Here’s a sample of the search terms used to discover the aforementioned Wiggle Chair. As you can see, there are some interesting (and, on the surface, unrelated) terms used to discover this object. Now, this data can then be compared against the discovery terms used to find other chairs in the collection, to build a more effective search thesaurus, suggested search terms, or, as I was calling it today – a ‘searchsonomy’.
(c) indicates a tag cloud click through.
Search terms used
+ 29/09/2006 – gehry
+ 29/09/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 28/09/2006 – wiggle chair
+ 28/09/2006 – wiggle chair
+ 28/09/2006 – cardboard (c)
+ 28/09/2006 – wiggle AND chair (c)
+ 28/09/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 27/09/2006 – gehry
+ 27/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 27/09/2006 – frank AND gehry (c)
+ 27/09/2006 – wiggle AND chair (c)
+ 26/09/2006 – Architecture
+ 25/09/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 24/09/2006 – frank AND gehry (c)
+ 24/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 23/09/2006 – plastic (c)
+ 20/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 20/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 20/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 20/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 20/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 20/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 19/09/2006 – modern (c)
+ 18/09/2006 – frank AND gehry (c)
+ 17/09/2006 – fibreglass (c)
+ 17/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 16/09/2006 – wiggle AND chair (c)
+ 16/09/2006 – wiggle AND chair (c)
+ 14/09/2006 – gehry AND chair AND wiggle
+ 14/09/2006 – wiggle AND chair (c)
+ 14/09/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 14/09/2006 – frank AND gehry
+ 14/09/2006 – cardboard (c)
+ 12/09/2006 – Architecture
+ 11/09/2006 – fibreglass (c)
+ 11/09/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 11/09/2006 – frank AND gehry (c)
+ 11/09/2006 – frank AND gehry (c)
+ 10/09/2006 – wiggle
+ 10/09/2006 – wiggle
+ 09/09/2006 – wiggle
+ 07/09/2006 – wiggle chair
+ 07/09/2006 – wiggle chair
+ 07/09/2006 – wiggle
+ 07/09/2006 – gehry AND chair
+ 06/09/2006 – cardboard (c)
+ 05/09/2006 – gehry AND chair
+ 05/09/2006 – gehry AND chair
+ 05/09/2006 – wiggle AND gehry
+ 03/09/2006 – fibreglass (c)
+ 02/09/2006 – wiggle chair
+ 01/09/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 31/08/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 30/08/2006 – University of California
+ 30/08/2006 – University of California
+ 30/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 30/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 30/08/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 30/08/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 29/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 29/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 28/08/2006 – chair
+ 28/08/2006 – chair
+ 28/08/2006 – wiggle chair
+ 23/08/2006 – double (c)
+ 22/08/2006 – frankgehry (c)
+ 22/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 21/08/2006 – gehry
+ 19/08/2006 – cardboard (c)
+ 18/08/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 17/08/2006 – University of California
+ 17/08/2006 – University of California
+ 16/08/2006 – Frank Gehry
+ 16/08/2006 – Frank Gehry
+ 16/08/2006 – chair
+ 14/08/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 12/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 12/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 11/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 11/08/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 11/08/2006 – wiggle chair (c)
+ 11/08/2006 – frank gehry (c)
+ 10/08/2006 – wiggle chair
+ 10/08/2006 – chair
+ 01/08/2006 – gehry
+ 30/07/2006 – furniture
+ 30/07/2006 – gehry
+ 30/07/2006 – chair
+ 29/07/2006 – architecture
+ 25/07/2006 – marylin sofa
+ 25/07/2006 – marylin sofa
+ 25/07/2006 – frank gehry
+ 23/07/2006 – marc newson (c)
+ 22/07/2006 – marc newson
+ 21/07/2006 – newton (c)
+ 13/07/2006 – chair
+ 13/07/2006 – chair
+ 12/07/2006 – weil
+ 07/07/2006 – chair
+ 07/07/2006 – chair
+ 07/07/2006 – chair
+ 13/06/2006 – chairs
+ 08/06/2006 – wiggle chair
Mal Booth over at the Australian War Memorial emailed the other day to tell me about their first exhibition blog, and asked about blog recommendations.
Thinking it might be sensible to share the information to help other museum bloggers, here’s what I sent (and a little bit more).
Please add your own recommendations in the comments if you have any favourite and essential WordPress plugins or tips.
This really is just a recommended start point.
Nice to have plugins
Depending on the content and target audience of your blog it might be useful to have an academic citation generator. This one lets people quote and reference your blog appropriately.
If you have multiple blogs and want to have a page that aggregates the RSS feeds of these, or you just want to aggregate other blogs’ feeds to a seperate page on your blog then you need the BDP RSS Aggregator.
If you ever need to embed code in your blog posts then you need RunPHP. This is particularly useful if you want to add interactive scripts to particular posts or subpages.
Maybe you want to put a Flash player in a post but want to make sure your visitors have a the right version of Flash. Then you need the Kimili Flash Embed plugin.
If your blog has a search feature then you are probably wondering how to get the serach to also search ‘pages’ instead of just ‘posts’. After days of fiddling we found this nifty Search Pages plugin.
Dealing with spam
Spam is a fact of life with blogs. Indeed if you don’t get spam then you should be worried, because it probably means the rest of the world can’t see your blog and you need to start doing a bit of promotion. Whilst there are plenty of spam plugins the most effective ones tend to cripple the ability of visitors to quickly leave comments, instead usually requiring them to enter some randomly generated set of character or answer a question. So, I’d been hunting for a robust but unobtrusive solution and now highly recommend SpamKarma for WP above all others. SpamKarma learns as it goes, blocks and keeps a blacklist of IPs and other nifty things – and best of all, it doesn’t interfere with visitors’ ability to leave comments.
Tracking RSS feeds
RSS feeds are great for visitors. They can quickly access the content of your site without actually visiting it – sometimes they never visit and just read the feed. This is good for them, but bad for you – if they don’t visit your page then your usual web analytics aren’t really going to kick in. And if they do you will be hard pressed to determine a lot about their interactions with your feed. The answer is Feedburner.
Redirect the RSS feeds to Feedburner (www.feedburner.com – set up an account). This way you can track who and what is accessing your RSS feeds and which articles are being read that way. If you have trouble getting wordpress to change the feed locations then use the Flagrant Disregard Feedburner WP plugin.
Promoting your blog
Claim your blog in Technorati. This helps you expose your blog to the rest of the world and tells Technorati that you exist. WordPress will automatically starting pinging Pingomatic each time you post but I’ve found that the best results are achieved by registering your blog with Technorati.
Technorati also lets you easily track who and what is linking to your blog which is useful to see who to do link swaps with (if that’s something you are interested in doing, or is some cases allowed to do), or just to build a better idea of why people are interested in your blog.
Then submit your blog to Museumblogs.org.
Categories
Full screen web video
Neave TV is an amazing (but processor heavy) Flash site that delivers video from Google Video, Youtube and Blip. Made by Paul Neave who also made Flash Earth which is also very very cool and combines Google Maps images with Microsoft Virtual Earth images.
Its a busy time at the museum at the moment with the Great Wall of China exhibition coming up in a few weeks. And there are a lot of deadlines so here’s a couple of interesting blog posts I’ve been reading recently.
Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School leaps to the defense of experimentation of social media like blogs and wikis within organisations. There has been a lot of talk about the internal impacts of these web technologies within museums – usually about the visitor/curator interaction that results – but there may also be some interesting lessons to be learned from IBM and other knowledge companies that have rolled out social media within their organisations to better implement knowledge management internally. And what are museums if they are not centrally about knowledge management?
Fascinating dialogue between Ulises Ali Mejias and Raph Koster following from a multi-person discussion piece in Harpers about video games and literacy.
Also, the American blogosphere has been full of discussion about changes at Facebook. As usual it is Fred Stutzman and danah boyd who offer some great meta-ideas around the how it is users who own social networks (at least at the moment).
Categories
What does a song look like
There is a nifty new visualisation tool for ‘visualising repetition in MIDI files’ called The Shape Of Song.
What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.
You can view (and hear) a stack of MIDI files on the site or you can point it at an URL containing a MIDI file. Already it has been overrun with Def Leppard and Tool.
Categories
Using VOIP to visit the past
Back in the pre-internet days, then back even further to my first computer, a Commodore 64 (of course!), I used to dial in to BBSes (bulletin board systems) on a 300 baud modem. For a moment I got excited when 1200/75 connections were possible to a commercial BBS-meets-teletex news system called Viatel here in Australia. That excitement was shortlived when I realised that it was content and not speed that mattered – and Viatel had content I really had little interest in – especially when private BBS systems held so much other material.
What happened to all of this?
Over at Vintage Computing there is a fascinating story of using VOIP to connect to some of the very few remaining ‘live’ BBS systems still up and running in America. I wonder if anyone is now trying to do this in Australia and whether any of the old boards are still running?
Here’s an excerpt but drop over and read the whole piece –
All this makes me wonder why the Sysops who own these BBSes keep them running with such little traffic. Did they just forget to turn off their machines in 1998 as the Internet finally swept away the traditional US BBS scene? Did the old Sysops die and nobody noticed that the automated machines were still running, undetected, in a dusty back room somewhere? The possibilities are incredibly compelling; they really stir the imagination. That’s why finding such forgotten realms elicits a sense of discovery in me, like being an explorer discovering a long-lost temple in the overgrown jungles of Peru — all the more reason to give the old places a visit.
Categories
Flickr and geotagging
I’m a little late on this but Flickr has implemented geotagging which is very nifty. I hope this means a widescale uptake of this feature.