Flickr Storm is a fantastic and fast new tag search tool for Flickr.
Unlike other good Flickr browsers like Airtight’s tag browser, Flickr Storm also searches ‘related words’.
For example – a search for Japan also pulls in, and accurately identifies, images tagged as sakura, kyoto, and even autumn leaves!
Another nice feature is its ‘advanced search’ which allows filtering by license conditions, great if you are looking for Creative Commons licensed or public domain images.
Today we launched Design Hub.
Design Hub represents another of the Powerhouse Museum’s next generation approaches to exploring museum collections integrating a magazine format with a detailed collection search (based on the museum’s recently launched OPAC2.0 project).
Design Hub aims to become the first place to look for design related resources – for designers, design students, and design enthusiasts. The project is the result of a 3 year Australian Research Council grant with the University of Western Sydney and University of Technology, and seeks to make accessible and meaningful the design collections of the world’s great design museums. The first museum design collection to be searchable is the Powerhouse Museum’s own and others will be progressively added over the next two years.
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The collection search currently utilises the same backend as OPAC2.0 but you will notice that it has a few features that are not yet implemented in the OPAC2.0 search (but will be shortly). The first of these is the ‘related searches’ which appears in the top right pane when search results are shown. ‘Related searches’ are search terms which retuen similar results, based on popularity.
The second feature is the ‘related objects’ which I am considering re-titling as ‘popular objects’. This displays the most popular object for that search term – which may not actually be amongst the first 5 or 10 object displayed in the main search result area.
We are still optimising the display of these features, but they are working reasonably well and will only get better and more ‘accurate’ as more searches are performed and more objects browsed.
In mid June 2006 the Powerhouse Museum launched the new online collection database. Internally referred to as OPAC2.0, the project put online nearly 62,000 object records, and 30,000 images, opening access to these records with intelligent search tools, serendipity tools and the ability for users to self-classify using folksonomies.
In just six weeks visitiation to the Museum’s website increased over 100% (excluding spiders and bots). In the 6 weeks from June 14-July 31 OPAC2.0 on its own received 239,001 visitors (excluding internal museum users) who performed a total of 386,199 successful searches leading to object views (we currently track anonymous data on search terms linked to object views to provide the necessary data for our recommendation engine) and over 1.2 million individual object views.
This post looks at some of the initial trends that are being observed.
1) The ‘long tail’ of collections
The long tail theory when applied to museums goes that museums have limited space to exhibit their objects so they gather together what they consider to be the most popular and most important from their collections, put them in showcases with labels, and exhibit them. The rest, or in the Powerhouse Museum’s case, 96% of the collection, sits in a warehouse in storage being preserved for some future time (at not insignificant cost). With the advent of the web, it was thought that at last these unseen collections could at last be brought to the public gaze – activating the ‘long tail’ of geographically spread niche interests that exist out in the community.
However there are two major obstacles to be overcome.
The first of these which remains a huge obstacle for many institutions is that of digitisation. Digitisation is expensive, time consuming, and needs to be justified for reasons other that just being an end in itself. Digitisation policies and procedures, formats and outputs, storage and documentation all differ from organisation to organisation. Digitisation doesn’t just refer to the act of imaging (2D or 3D) but also of digital storing and preserving, collection research and records – which in the Powerhouse Museum’s case date back over 100 years. And what of those objects like computer software that are ‘born digital’?
The second, which we have been working hard to find solutions to, is ‘exposure’. Once a collection is online how does one make sure that it is exposed to all those geographically dispersed niche audiences that ‘long tail’ theories assume want to access them? There have been many noble attempts at federated collection searches across institutions, and at making individual collections available in novel ways. But the main problem has remained that usually the audiences for these niche collections are in the main, researchers – and that as a result the raw traffic that these sites receive is quite small and narrow.
Popular objects are the first indicator of the long tail.
[graph of top 200 objects by number of views]
The top 10 most popular objects (as of the date of this post) are –
(the number in brackets represents total views)
1 – (1274) 88/4 Steam locomotive, No. 3830, iron/steel/brass, New South Wales Government Railways, Eveleigh Rai …
2 – (873) 94/129/1 Evening dress, womens, `Chocolate box’, plastic/fabric, Jenny Bannister for Chai, Australia …
3 – (791) 2005/1/1 Evening dress, beaded pink chiffon trimmed with charms, designed by Lisa Ho and made in the …
4 – (788) 88/5 Locomotive, full size, steam, No.1243, metal/glass, Davy and Company, Atlas Engineering Works, …
5 – (754) B1495 Aircraft, flying boat, Catalina, PB2B-2, “Frigate Bird II”, VH-ASA, metal / fabric, Boeing Air …
6 – (606) 95/23/1 Dress, evening, silk / polyester, designed by Jenny Bannister, Melbourne, Victoria, Australi …
7 – (550) 97/208/1 Shoes, pair, womens, ‘Super elevated gillies’, leather/ cork/ silk, Autumn/ Winter collecti …
8 – (471) 92/305 Food safe (bush pantry), wood/ metal, unknown maker, [Queensland], Australia, c. 1925 …
9 – (444) 2005/127/1 Clothing (9), boys, cotton / wool / metal / mother-of-pearl / plastic / paper / cardboard …
10 – (432) 90/816 Aircraft, full-size, helicopter, Bell 206B Jetranger III, “Dick Smith Australian Explorer”, V …
Now from our total object view figures we can determine that even the most popular object – the steam locomotive no 3830 – represents only 0.1% of all views. Because OPAC2.0 has only be online for 7 weeks we are yet to reach a point where ALL possible objects have been viewed at least once – but we are already at 75%.
What is particularly interesting is the sheer diversity of objects viewed, and that once past the top 10 or 20 objects, the curve flattens right out and by the time we reach the 109th most popular object, the next 46,000 objects have under 200 object views – but still have been viewed at least once.
2. Serendipitous exploration
One of the key elements of OPAC2.0 is its serendipity features. Although only in its most basic first iteration at the moment, almost every object view ‘suggests’ other objects to view. For example viewing a piece of 1940s medical equipment also displays links to other similar equipment. The impact of this is not so pronounced for users that come in via the front door but for users coming in directly to object records via Google or other searches this actively encourages them to stay and look around (at least within their area of interest).
The average number of successful searches per visit is 1.62.
The average number of objects viewed per visit is 5.02.
Contrast this with the single view per visit that objects on our previous ‘packaged collection’ received and the change is particularly marked.
The serendipity engine currently mines the Museum’s object thesaurus. This allows users to browse other objects that belong to the same object ‘category’ as the object they are looking at. Users can also browse ‘up’ a branch to explore other related categories without leaving the object page.
We have recently turned on the displaying of ‘subject’ associations for object views. These subjects are entered at time of acquisition by registrars at the Museum, and added to by curators as research is undertaken.This adds extra metadata to each object classifying recent acquisitions by a thematic subject terms or terms.
For example, 97/278/1 Mirror, glass/metal, part of Narrabri Stellar Interferometer, designed by Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Twiss, Officine Galileo, Italy, 1960-1961 calls up associations ‘optical astronomy’ and ‘School of Physics, University of Sydney’ – both of which allow further exploration for similar objects.
The next stage which will be implemented on OPAC2.0 in the coming weeks is ‘popularity’-based recommendations. These are currently being tested on Design Hub. Popularity based recommendations work at the search level and make two different recommendations to the user.
The first of these popularity recommendations is ‘similar searches’. Similar searches looks at the search terms entered by the user and compares the results with other terms that have resulted in ‘clicks’ for similar objects. This is very useful in revealing, for example, that the search term ‘chair’ is ‘similar’ to a search for ‘Marc Newson’ of ‘Frank Gehry’.
The second popularity-based recommendation is that of ‘popular objects’. This is a much simpler lookup which examines the search results and ranks them by past usage for that particular term. Through this method we can cut through a rather meaningless free text search for ‘chair’ and reasonably return the Wiggle Chair as most popular (but not necessarily, by algorithm, ‘most relevant’).
3. Search terms, folksonomies & Google
What complicates matters considerably is an examination of ‘search terms’ used on the site.
Here are the top 20 terms for July.
88-4, 99-9-1, 98-2, ring, suit, female, 1934, fashion, mineral, nylon, shoe, bowls, human, camera, birmingham, costume, cap, shell, bag, satin
The first three of these correspond directly to 3 objects that are being redirected from our old catalogue – so they can be discounted. The other 17, though, interestingly enough are terms that have been entered as ‘user keywords’ and appear on the home page as part of our tag cloud. Coupled with the serendipity features described earlier, what seems to be happening in this early stage is two fold.
Firstly, Google is picking up the folksonomy keywords and associated objects. It is also picking up every object in our collection – very nicely. We are not quite certain yet as to the impact here but overall our Google-originating traffic has increased by roughly the same margin as overall site visitation. Our ability to replicate traffic patterns ourselves in Google is at best unreliable although we do know that doing a search for ‘Delta Goodrem dress’ in Google explains the sudden popularity of a particular Goodrem-related object. However searching for any of the above 17 terms doesn’t, by themselves, get any Powerhouse results in the first few pages.
Secondly, we think that single word search terms will always win out over phrase searching – despite the best efforts of library folk to educate users to make ‘more accurate’ searches. This explains the popularity of these rather odd single words to some degree. The other major factor with single words is that the prominence of the tag cloud encourages first-time users to start their browsing of our collection through those entry points. Certainly usability testing tells us that the average user is more likely to click a word in a big font rather than type something.
OPAC 2.0 was developed by Sebastian Chan and Giv Parvaneh with collection assistance from Lynne McNairn. OPAC 2.0 is a project wholly developed by the Powerhouse Museum using internal staff resources and creativity. It is written in PHP, runs off a large Microsoft SQL database and uses some AJAX for display purposes. The collection database that it searches and displays runs Emu by kEmu as a collection management system.
OPAC 2.0’s success to date rests on the high quality content written and produced over many years by the research and collection staff at the Powerhouse Museum. Without their expertise, there would be no collection to search.
IBM provides a very simple introductory article by Duane Merrill on web mashups which is good and easy reading for those new to the concept. It introduces the basic technical ideas and provides a solid set of linkages to further explore.
Mashups are certainly an exciting new genre of Web applications. The combination of data modeling technologies stemming from the Semantic Web domain and the maturation of loosely-coupled, service-oriented, platform-agnostic communication protocols is finally providing the infrastructure needed to start developing applications that can leverage and integrate the massive amount of information that is available on the Web. As mashup applications gain higher visibility, it will be interesting to see how the genre impacts social issues such as fair-use and intellectual property as well as other application domains that integrate data across organizational boundaries, such as grid computing and business-to-business workflow management.
The Powerhouse Museum has been doing quite a few new online experiments this year and the simplest of these – so simple that any other museum large or small could do too – is public facing blogging. I’m not talking about this blog, Fresh+New, which itself is getting around 10,000 visitors each month but is more of a specialist museum-professional blog; but informational blogs that communicate generalist information directly to the public.
Currently we have two such blogs with another two on their way in coming weeks – Design Hub which is a combination collection portal and design blog, and Free Radicals which extends the museum’s public sustainability-related talks series into a current affairs and science blog.
The first public facing blog is Walking The Wall, a blog that tracks the travels of Brendan Fletcher and Emma Nicholas, two amateur walkers who approached the museum with an offer to document their walk of the Great Wall of China. Brendan and Emma had heard about the museum’s upcoming Great Wall of China exhibition, and wanted to contribute in some way. The museum met with them and my team suggested that might wish to document their walk by writing a blog as they walked the route of the wall. We trained them quickly on WordPress which they quickly picked up and they were off. Both Emma and Brendan had previous writing credentials, good photography skills, and we had confidence that they would do a good job – we also pointed them to a few popular travel blogs to show them the style of writing and content we were after.
The second is Observations which is written by the staff at the Sydney Observatory. Observations allows the Sydney Observatory to contribute regularly updated content to their website in a manner which can address the immediate interests and questions of the general public, as well as help promote their specialist events, and the research undertaken at the Observatory and by associated amateur astronomy groups. The Observatory staff were briefed on the ways in which blogging operated in terms of a communication method and general protocols. They also got a quick introduction to WordPress – but that was it.
So, what impact have these blogs had on interactions with the museum? And have they contributed to online visitation?
In July 2006 Walking The Wall received 6,739 visitors, and the Observations blog 3,698 visitors. It is fair to say that a large proportion of the visitors are new visitors – and the overall increase in site visitation, especially at the Sydney Observatory indicates that. Excluding spam, the Walking The Wall blog has logged 186 visitor comments (for 28 posts) and Observations 43 comments (for 25 posts).
Walking The Wall has received media attention and has is featured regularly on national radio (ABC Radio National and 702) as people around the country follow the journey. In many ways, Walking The Wall is operating as a good travel blog should – allowing readers to live vicariously through our intrepid adventurers.
Observations is allowing the Sydney Observatory to respond to current events such as the August 27 Mars hoax email – a post that has already attracted 30 comments to date – in a manner that was previously impossible to achieve quickly and easily on the main Observatory website.
Liz Losh posts an interesting and sensible list of principles for raising children with technology. (I spent a few hours last weekend reading the equally sensible and logical Honey, We Lost the Kids: Re-thinking Childhood in the Multimedia Age by Kathleen McDonnell which I picked up at the local library).
The first three principles are most interesting –
1) Play with Your Child
Dr. Spock revolutionized child care a half-century ago by stating that the first rule to new parents should be “enjoy your baby.” With longer workdays for parents and ramped up expectations in school and society for kids, it can be easy to forget to play with them as they get older. Your personal preference may be to have your child cream you in chess rather than in a first-person shooter, but if you aren’t willing to play digitally, you are likely to be widening the generation gap. There are lots of good, less-publicized choices out there. Consider something like the award-winning, fun-for-all-ages game Cloud from students at USC and their faculty advisor Tracy Fullerton, which can be downloaded free online. If you are intimidated by videogames, consider other opportunities for creative play. For starters, you could have fun with music-making machines like Pâte à Son from le ciel est bleu or the Indian Shankar Drum Ganesh Machine, or a paint animation like Jackson Pollock by Miton Manetas.
.2) Go Low Budget
You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on expensive controllers, games, and software for digital family fun. A megabucks game from a Hollywood franchise might not bring you any closer to your child. Instead, consider these four options.
A. Free open source software that lets your kids create games, animations, movies, and audio remixes like the 3-D modeling program Blender or the sound mixing program Audacity.
B. Free 30-day-trials of otherwise expensive corporate packages. Kids can make elaborate animated cartoons for the web and cell phones with Flash or make music with Sony Acid, although they may complain when the month is up.
C. For less than the cost of a typical sixty dollar game, your kids can make their own games. Quest Creator, RPG Maker, and — for the lover of virtual gore or mayhem — FPS Creator are all within most family budgets.
D. Check out what comes with the machine. For example, a lot of Macs come with the versatile program iMovie.3) Bring Digital Politics to the Dinner Table
Talk to your kids about new laws that limit or may limit users’ digital rights. It’s important that they understand the basics of copyright law and why they can’t post their clever claymation video on YouTube or MySpace, if the soundtrack is a top ten hit owned by a megamedia company.
Luckily Creative Commons makes it possible for kids to find photos, sound samples, and film clips in the public domain. (Check out this video made by my thirteen-year-old to see an example.)
You might also want to point out how the arcane and obfuscatory language in user agreements can contain fine print that allows their personal information to be shared with third parties. Game playing devices can also store data from other software applications.
Amazing and beautiful animation sequence made entirely with royalty-free Clip Art from Oliver Laric who has some other interesting art projects on his site
Some reporting from Advertising Age on the new Wal-Mart ‘social networking’ and viral marketing campaign.
No doubt leery of all the problems with MySpace.com, Wal-Mart’s site disqualifies any video with “materials that are profane, disruptive, unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, vulgar, obscene, hateful, or racially or ethnically-motivated, or otherwise objectionable.” That’s why “pending approval” notes dominate pages already created and content is limited to a headline, a fashion quiz and a favorite song. Wal-Mart also plans to e-mail the parents of every registered teen, giving them the discretion to pull a submission.
Moreover, the retailer reserves the right to edit the commercial created with the winning video, obviously hoping to avoid the fate of Chevrolet’s Tahoe, which allowed consumers to create their own video spots unchecked and ended up with some unflattering results.
So a subversive, ironic ad by a savvy teen on how her dad’s hardware shop closed down after the retail goliath rolled into town would likely be “otherwise objectionable” to Wal-Mart.
The tight controls will work against Wal-Mart’s goal to make the site more edgy and will instead cement the retailer’s image as a conformist brand, said Tim Stock, a researcher with New York-based Scenario DNA, a research firm devoted to studying Gen Y.
“The second you try to create boundaries and draw a line around content and put a box around content, it becomes something else. Teens aren’t searching for what a company deems relevant, but what they deem relevant,” Mr. Stock said. “You can’t own it. When anyone tries to own it too much, then it becomes a problem. That’s the impression I get on this site.”
The ‘necessary’ lockdown/controls reminds me of the equally ‘necessary’ lockdown in ACMI’s ACMIparks priject as discussed earlier.
Given that I am in the market for a new phone I’ve been bitterly disappointed by the lack of truly ‘converged’ devices out here on the market. The most ‘feature rich’ have usability problems when it comes to making phone calls (touchscreen dialing! why?), and those that have really usable decent sized phone/numeric keypads force you to use SMS or predictive keystrokes for your email. Don’t get me started on the camera features.
The always enetrtaining and rather cynical Andrew Orlowski explores why there aren’t any real smartphones – or truly ‘coverged’ devices – available.
t one time, the future of mobiles looked simple. The smartphone was a new kind of gadget that was subsuming the pager, the camera, the PDA, the Walkman, and almost every other iece of technology you could carry – and offering it in volume at an irresistible price. Often free. Over time, every phone would become a smartphone.
Expectations were sky high.
Worthwhile reading.
I’m surprised Orlowski didn’t mention the 6th excuse . . . . that of device manufacturers having an economic disincentive to creating the uber-device. If customers are happily (or unhappily) buying existing products then why create a product that destroys the market for the rest of your range? Or one that threatens the manufacturer’s relationship with the networks it relies on – and thus forces any emerging device to be seriously crippled (the iPodPhone for example)?
Trumping the earlier picks from Pitchfork are another 100 selections of the most creative/interesting music videos from Stylus Magazine.