Categories
Interactive Media

Many Eyes – another online data visualisation tool

Many Eyes is another online data visualisation tool. Created by the people behind the Baby Name Voyager and other nifty visualisation tools, Many Eyes looks pretty amazing. It uses Java rather than Flash for the visualisations.

Unlike Swivel, who modified their T&C to offer a Creative Commons model the T&C for Many Eyes, being an IBM project is overly restrictive.

Any information that You submit to IBM and the results are considered non-confidential, and IBM will be free to disclose them for any purpose. IBM will not return to You the information You submit. For quality control and other purposes, IBM may monitor your use of the Service and transmission of information through it. IBM is not responsible for any third party seeing or obtaining information or results transmitted through the Service.

Any data submitted should at least require proper attribution by IBM.

That said, take a look, the data upload is just a cut & paste which is surprisingly robust and easier than uploading a formatted file. The range of visualisation choices, their speed and interactivity is lovely.

Categories
Young people & museums

Children’s participation in cultural activities in Australia

In December the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the results of the survey into children’s participation in cultural and leisure activities.

Museums and art galleries

There were 995,200 children who visited a museum or art gallery during the 12 month period. The rate of attendance at museums or art galleries was similar for boys and girls (38% and 36% respectively). The attendance rate was the same for 5 to 8 and 9 to 11 year olds (40%) but lower (31%) for those aged 12 to 14 years. Children born overseas in main English-speaking countries were more likely to go to a museum or art gallery (48% attending) compared with those born in Australia (38%) and in non English-speaking countries (26%). Attendance at museums and art galleries ranged from 60% for children in the Australian Capital Territory to 32% for those in New South Wales.

There are also interesting figures on internet and computer usage amongst this age group in Australia.

The full report can be downloaded for free.

Categories
Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Dragon & the Pearl on YouTube

We’ve put some ‘ultrasound footage’ of our resident baby dragon, from before it hatched from its mysterious egg, up on YouTube and linked from the dragon blog.

In putting it on YouTube we’ve tagged it in a way that we hope will attract those interested in UFO footage and the like, exposing our museum programme to other audiences. We’ve already started getting a few people who have seen the dragon posting about it on their own blogs, but hopefully with YouTube we can get it out to many more people.

It has been a very successful public programme and lots of fun. The dragon is ‘resting in the mountains’ at the moment but will return one last time in March.

Feel free to comment and rate it on YouTube. I’m hoping that such activities might have a similar result to that achieved by Ideum’s experiments with the Flickr ‘interestingness’ measure.

Categories
Web 2.0 Web metrics Young people & museums

Latest Pew report – teens and social networking usage

It has taken a few days for the figures from the latest Pew internet report to spread across the blogosphere. This report, Social Networking Websites & Teens, begins to problematise some of the ‘trends’ that have been generally ‘accepted’, and reveals some of the uneven use of these services by different genders and age groups.

Here is the abstract –

A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users. In the past five years, such sites have rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users. More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The survey also finds that older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.

danah boyd presents some excellent discussion of the report and points out that some of the figures might be the result of Pew’s methodology. That said, she focusses in on some of the ways that Pew reports that different teens actually ‘use’ services like MySpace. Fred Stutzman also covers the report.

Unsurprisingly The Register takes a sobering view of the report and uses it as another example of the ‘about to pop’ bubble-like nature of everything 2.0 at the moment.

Categories
Interactive Media

Ellen Lupton on Free Font Manifesto

Our very own Design Hub interviews Ellen Lupton.

What inspired you to initiate the free font manifesto? Were you surprised by the response you received to the concept of free fonts?

Given my interest in ‘open’ design, I wanted to find out if there was an open-source movement in the typeface design community, which is a particular subculture within the broader graphic design world. Typeface designers have always been protective of their intellectual property, because fonts are so easy to steal and there is a huge problem with piracy. I had been invited to address typeface designers and typographers at an international design conference, so I decided to explore the topic of ‘free fonts’. I created a blog to accompany my talk — a new experiment for me. Given the controversial nature of the topic, I wanted to get feedback from my audience beyond the usual Q&A session after the talk. And feedback I certainly got! News of the blog spread like wildfire, and a heated debate ensued on-line. I learned a lot, not only about the passions and worries of the font design community but also about the nature of online communication.

Categories
AV Related Interactive Media

Using Keynote for digital signage in galleries

The Digital Signage Project is a nifty hack of Apple’s Powerpoint-killer Keynote to use it for kiosk-style signage.

Using Keynote for the presentation layer means visitors would get the benefit of superior text rendering and presentation styles to other signage applications.

Categories
Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

The future of social networking? What of Second Life?

The arrival of a new year always brings all sorts of fascinating predictions.

Two commentators on social networking sites who I always have a lot of time for are boyd and Stutzman. Between them they have revealed much about how young people use online social networking services and how young people interact with each other. Their predictions for the future trends in these services are revealing reading.

Stuztman makes a broad range of predictions, most notably that within the US there will be a shakeout of services and that the most established (MySpace, Bebo and Facebook) will be difficult to displace. He reminds us that whilst users might visit lots of different sites, they can only actively keep their own personas on one or two at a time. Protocols such as OpenID will become more necessary to support interoperability across different services – otherwise users will leave. Two other key points he makes are that informational/transactional sites with established communities of users/visitors will attempt to social-ise their user experience and that this will increase the importance of shared experience to the emergence of community.

boyd also introduces new ideas. A few days ago she reminded us that teens do not use these social networking services in the same way that older people do (that is – us). For some, forgetting a password is an experience that is fixed by simply creating a new identity on the site, or moving off to another site. Harking back to the youth studies field, she reminds us that for teenagers and youth, these sites offer a means for identity experimentation, in a way that adults do not often have the time to do with such zeal.

In her thoughts for 2007 boyd sees a fading of enthusiasm amongst teens for the major social networking services. She cites anecdotal evidence that on one hand, new teen users are growing wary of the negative coverage of stranger danger on these sites, and on the other, those who currently use these services are being turned off by the influx of PR and marketing which is getting in the way of the main reason they use these services – to communicate to their friends in their own space. The mass scale intrusion of marketing and more recently spam into some of these services is a growing problem and threatens to make some environments as unfriendly as the ‘mall’ where if you aren’t a potential shopper then you are not welcome.

So, what of Second Life?

Second Life is, as Nina Simon writes is really a social site with the look of a MMORPG. It certainly isn’t a game, as many commentators point out, Linden Labs has set it up with only the most basic of rules. People go to Second Life to, in the words of Simon, “buy items online, view/listen to concerts online, meet up with people you already know (through work, family, friends) all over the world”.

If this user intentionality is correct then I’m very interested in applying Stutzman and boyd’s predictions to Second Life. How will it survive – especially if the churn rates are as high as Shirky believes?

Some questions.

– What of persona interoperability? Using Second Life as a platform does require significant investment from the user which will inevitability take them away from maintenance of their personas on other services. Gary Hayes is positive about this, but also suggest that as open source WordPress equivalents for setting up ‘multi-user virtual environments’ become available, Second Life will have a lot of challengers. His post on MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach is an interesting look at what is likely to fragment that user base of all environments pretty quickly.

– This, then, leads into the next issue – what of the increased presence of real world companies? Will certain user groups be turned off by the presence of the real world in their Second Life alter-reality?

– What of intentionality? A lot of work has gone in from educators using Second Life as a platform for engaging particular niche audiences with learning – using Second Life as a classroom etc. But how many of these Second Life students continue to be users/citizens after class? Does it matter?

Categories
AV Related Interactive Media Web 2.0

Time based video annotation online

Mojiti and BubblePly offer time based video annotation for content posted on the main online video sharing sites. With these you can add your own subtitles or speech bubbles or other commentary to videos while they play for sharing and commenting by other viewers (who have to view the annotated video’ through either BubblePly or Mojiti).

The source file on YouTube etc stays untouched and what these two services are doing is hosting the annotations and then overlaying them as the source video plays embedded in their site.

This is a nifty idea and something that Mike Jones first suggested would be cool – in relation to some art and academic projects – about a year ago around our lunch table. Well, now it is here.

I’d assume that for most this will be a gimmick (see the sample movies on BubblePly) or useful for niche audiences (see the subtitling samples on Mojiti) but there are some really interesting possibilities for artists and others to play around with this technology too.

I remember a presentation by some academic researchers at University of Queensland who were experimenting with SMIL to build automated narrative generators and video search tools. I am not 100% sure of the project but it could have been related to the work of the Harmony Project.

Categories
Collection databases Web 2.0 Web metrics

Lorcan Dempsey on ‘intentional data’

Lorcan Dempsey opens the new year with a great post with lots of outward linkages on the under-utilisation of intentional data by libraries.

In general, consumer sites on the web make major use of such data, and it is especially valuable when they can connect it to individial identities. They use it to build up user profiles, to do rating and comparisons across sites, to recommend, and so on. Of course this is increasingly important in an environment of abundant choice and scarce attention: they are investing more effort in ‘consumption management’. We are all familiar with the benefits, and the irritations, of organizations who want to build a deeper understanding of what we do and make us offers based on that.

Libraries have a lot of data about users and usage. And there are now some initiatives which are looking at sharing it. However, in general, libraries do not have a data-driven understanding of individual users’ behaviors, or of systemwide performance of particular information resources. This is likely to change in coming years given the value of such data. So, we are seeing the growth in interest in sharing database usage data. And technical agreements and business incentives for third party providers will support this development. And, of course, libraries want to preserve the privacy of learning and research choices.

Whilst libraries are in a fundamentally better position to know more about the intentions of their users, museums tend to restrict their interest to the very visitation/donation-oriented CRM model of intention tracking.

As Dempsey points out, such data actually has much broader implications for organisations, and he summarises Chunku Mui’s proposed taxonomy of ‘Emergent Knowledge’ – knowledge that is gained about users by analysing behaviour gathered from log data and user pattern analysis.

At the Powerhouse Museum we have only very recently, with our OPAC2.0 project, started to move beyond simple log file analysis for intentional data from our website users, and now into beginning to examine the emergent trends in collection popularity. I hope that by the time Museums & The Web 2007 comes around in April, we will have the first of our open APIs to connect and use data patterns from our Synonymiser Beta.

This will allow any museum with a similar collection (or subset) to mine our anonymous behaviour data to generate recommendation data for their own collections.

Categories
Digital storytelling

Simple gender determination from linguistic analysis

The Gender Genie is a little text analyser that suggest the gender of the writer based on the frequency and occurrence of particular words. (via Gizmodo)