Today we went live with another one of the new experimental features of our collection database – auto-generation of tags based on semantic parsing. Throughout the Museum’s collection database you will now find, in the right hand column of the more recently acquired objects (see a quick sample list), a new cluster of content titled [...]
Entries from March 31st, 2008
Google Teleportation / Google’s ‘search within search’
March 27th, 2008 8 Comments
Google’s ‘search within search’ or as they call it ‘teleporting‘ has hit the Powerhouse Museum. I’m not sure whether this is a compliment or not, but as the New York Times reports, this is a very interesting development which raises many issues for content-rich sites with vested interests in their own internal search. As you [...]
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Sydney Observatory blog – lessons from the first 2 years, an interview with Nick Lomb
March 24th, 2008 Comments Off
The Sydney Observatory blog will turn 2 in June. It has been an enormous success for the Observatory with its traffic now accounting for at least half of all traffic to the Observatory website each months. Since its launch there have been 291 posts to date and 1073 filtered comments. The Sydney Observatory blog is [...]
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Free talk – ‘New web technologies and museums’ – Wednesday 26 March at the Powerhouse Museum
March 24th, 2008 1 Comment
If you’ve missed any of my recent presentations then I am doing a bit of a ‘remix’ of them this Wednesday, March 26 (edited!) at the Powerhouse Museum from 1230pm to 130pm. Entry is free after normal museum admission. As a part of the ‘Talks After Noon‘ series I will be talking about the future [...]
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Behind the scenes of Launchball – an interview with Daniel Evans, Frankie Roberto, and Mike Ellis
March 20th, 2008 1 Comment
There is a lot to learn from the Science Museum’s (London) recent success with their Launchball online game. The project has been enormously successful and recently won ‘best of show’ at SxSW. I conducted an interview with Daniel Evans, Frankie Roberto, and Mike Ellis to explore some of the ideas and processes behind the project. [...]
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Museum transparency and the IMA Dashboard – an interview with Rob Stein
March 18th, 2008 1 Comment
Last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art launched their Dashboard – a visual display of various data about the museum and its activities. Updated regularly the Dashboard gives open public access to much data that would usually be buried deep in an annual report. The ‘transparency’ that the Dashboard offers is remarkable – it not [...]
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Doing online interactives properly – Science Museum’s Launchball at SxSW
March 11th, 2008 2 Comments
The Science Museum’s Launchball has just taken out ‘best of show‘ at South by Southwest. That a museum website interactive could possibly take out that award is truly remarkable and a testament to the Science Museum’s web team. I can’t think on another example where a cultural organisation has had the nouse to make a [...]
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Applying a new social media framework from Forrester to the cultural sector
March 11th, 2008 Comments Off
Josh Bernoff at Forrester has put together another good chart of how corporations might use social media to support five key functions – research, marketing, sales, support and development. He neatly ties together function, objective, the appropriate choice of social media application, and then a success metric for each. Whilst the cultural sector may not [...]
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‘Intention’ – museums as information sources or ‘platforms’
March 10th, 2008 3 Comments
I’ve been talking a lot about ‘intention’ recently and it needs a bit of explanation. In the commercial world of the web realisations are being made that not every ‘page view’ is equal and that advertising on social networks is not the cash cow that it was assumed it would be.
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Listening, engaging, acknowledging museums fans
March 10th, 2008 Comments Off
Even if your museum isn’t engaged in making forays into social media itself then your audiences certainly are. In the workshops that I’ve been running with Angelina Russo and Jerry Watkins I am yet to find a museum that isn’t being actively discussed, critiqued, blogged, photographed, and videoed online. The real question for museums is [...]
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