Fresh & New(er)

ABC’s Digital Futures Blog

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date October 16, 2006

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.

Interactive Media Web 2.0

10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date October 2, 2006

10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website is essential reading.

Interactive Media Web 2.0 Web metrics

OPAC2.0 New features – locations and search terms

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date September 30, 2006

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’.

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

Interactive Media Web 2.0

Museum blogging and WordPress plugins

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date September 26, 2006
4 Comments on Museum blogging and WordPress plugins

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.

Web 2.0

A new Powerhouse Museum blog – Free Radicals

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date September 15, 2006
1 Comment on A new Powerhouse Museum blog – Free Radicals

Today the Powerhouse Museum launched the Free Radicals blog.

The blog promotes a monthly talks series at the Museum of the same name which covers current issues in sustainability and science. The blog is intended to expand the Museum’s coverage and response to the issues raised by the talks series, as well as allowing community feedback. There is a podcast archive of previous talks available on the site and future talks will be added as they happen, allowing those who miss the on site event to participate in their own time and in their own location.

Folksonomies Web 2.0

OPAC2.0: A better search is here

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date September 13, 2006

Today we finally ironed out one of the major problems with the search engine on our OPAC2.0/collection database.

There are still some tweaks to be done on the results, and the advanced search needs to implemented but the new search is much better than the original.

If you have some spare moments and feel like trying a few searches, please do so. If something odd happens then I’d welcome your thoughts in a comment on this post.

Next up for OPAC2.0 is the presentation of ‘other search terms similar to X’ and ‘others who searched for X looked at’ alongside search results. We have already implemented this on Design Hub and have the code and data ready to go.

Then it is on to adding a automatic spell checker for the folksonomy tags to reduce post-user tag editing.

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