I came across this amazing site that lets you buy and sell “all things handmade”. But before you say “big deal, it’s just another online store”, take a closer look. There are a few clever search tools that allow you to find what you are looking for in a totally unique way. You can find an item by picking a colour, clicking on a location on the world map or fly through time to find items added in the past.
* make sure you check the colour search tool.
Today we made live our ‘OPAC 2.0’ project.
OPAC 2.0 has been developed by the Powerhouse Museum’s Web Services team in conjunction with Registration and Curatorial Departments. OPAC 2.0, as the name might suggest, represents the next generation of online collection browsing.
Using technology developed in-house, OPAC 2.0 allows users to browse nearly 62,000 current object records from Emu. Whilst some of these were previously viewable on AMOL/CAN, OPAC 2.0 now makes these available through the Powerhouse’s own website – and keeps them current and updated.
Improving on previous collection search tools, OPAC 2.0 tracks and responds to user behaviour recommending ‘similar’ objects increase serendipitous discovery and encouraging browsing of our collection. It also keeps track of searches and dynamically ranks search results based on actual user interactions. Over time, this artificial intelligence will improve as it learns from users, and will allow for dynamic recommendations.
OPAC 2.0 also incorporates a folksonomy engine allowing users to tag objects for later recall by themselves or others.
In keeping with the nature of a collection database OPAC 2.0 is designed to be in a state of perpetual development with new features and tweaks being added periodically. As object records are edited, added or changed in our collection management system, Emu, OPAC 2.0 will periodically add them to its database. In early August the available images of each object will greatly improve as Emu is merged with our current image database FirstFoto.
Likewise, new features already planned to be added include exhibition locations, and the ability for teachers and educators to ‘bundle up’ personalised selections of object choices for use in teaching situations.
OPAC 2.0 would not have been possible without the hard work of the Web Services team, the registrars and curators at the Museum, and all the international beta testers who gave feedback on early versions from around the world.
Mutek is a Canadian electronic music and digital art festival that happens every May in Montreal. I spoke at Mutek 2003 and it was one of the most interesting and experimentally-oriented music event I’ve yet been to.
Inoveryourhead has recorded and offers as a podcast one of their expert/industry panels on ‘Are Records Dead?’. The podcast addresses issues of digital distribution and changes in media. It features speakers from Beatport (digital distributors), Forced Exposure (traditional distributors) artists and marketing managers.
This should be listened to in the context of some of the Future Of Music podcasts I blogged about last year.
We’ve all had a play with Google maps. It’s fun to zoom around the globe and try to locate your own house. But the developers at Yahoo have managed to adapt their map technology to interact with current fuel prices and help you shop around for the cheapest service station in your area.
http://au.maps.yahoo.com/fuelwatch/
Pretty cool.
This is a very nifty little thing – Bitty . . . I’m already thinking of the possibilities of ‘web feedback’ . . . . like the old 70s video feedback.
Seriously, though, this could be implemented in so many nifty ways.
So, finally, Microsoft have realised that the world needs a better selection of fonts than Arial (which is not the same as Helvetica however much you might argue it is) and Verdana and Times New Roman.
Even more so now that we are all spending a lot more time reading screens rather than printed paper.
Poynter have some interesting, but brief, discussion of the various pros and cons of these new typefaces.
WikiMapia is a project to describe the whole planet Earth. The developers have combined a wiki with Google Maps to create this amazing resource that allows you to highlight any spot on earth and describe it in your own words. You can even tag these locations so people can find them using keywords. Try doing a search for “Powerhouse”.
http://www.wikimapia.org/
Such a nifty visualisation of history.
But what a shame it isn’t printable.
New web 2.0-ish site called Krunch.
As of now, Krun.ch enables you to
» Upload and compress files
» Pick and compress files from the web
» Upload and un-compress a compressed archive
» Un-compress a compressed file from the web
What is particularly neat is the ability to supply a URL of a compressed file and use Krunch to open and download selected contents from it . . . .
This lovely little HMTL visualisation applet is doing the rounds at the moment. It is built in Processing and the source code is already being hacked by others to build variants.
Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.
HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I’ve written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.
(from Aharef. Source code available there as well.)