Flickr has been on fire recently with the addition of ‘Galleries’. Galleries have been put to great use – apparently 25,000 galleries in the first week – including the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s lovely Astrophotography gallery and, of course, those around the Sydney dust storm, Now Aaron Straup-Cope, also of Flickr, has released an alpha version [...]
Entries from October 6th, 2009
A new strategic plan for the Powerhouse
September 16th, 2009 9 Comments
A few days ago we published our new Strategic Plan to be implemented over the next couple of years. The plan has come together through focus groups with external stakeholders, communities, specialists; as well as a long process of rethinking and reorganisation within the Museum as well. This has been the most broadly consultative ‘strategic [...]
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Common Ground – The Global Flickr Commons Meetup October 2 & 3
September 3rd, 2009 Comments Off
Common Ground – The Global Flickr Commons Meetup October 2 & 3 On October 2 & 3, depending on where you are in the world a group of institutions who have put photographs into the Commons on Flickr are having a ‘meet up’. The Powerhouse is hosting the Sydney one on Saturday October 3, 630-9pm. [...]
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Research into the value of public sector information for cultural institutions
September 2nd, 2009 Comments Off
The Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce is calling for quotes for a range of research projects. Project #6 (pdf) is a quick turnaround project examining the ‘value of public sector information for cultural institutions’. AU$40,000 is available with a quote deadline of 9 September. Report due by 19 October. Scope: Assess and quantify the economic and [...]
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Introducing About NSW – maps, census visualisations, cross search
September 2nd, 2009 8 Comments
Well here’s an alpha release of something that we’ve been working on forever (well, almost 2 years). It is called About NSW and is a bit of a Frankenstein creation of different data sets mashed together by a sophisticated backend. The project began with an open-ended brief to be a cross-sectorial experiment in producing new [...]
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Moving out in to the cloud – reverse proxying our website
August 25th, 2009 Comments Off
For a fair while we’ve been thinking about how we can improve our web hosting. At the Powerhouse we host everything in-house and our IT team does a great job of keeping things up and running. However as traffic to our websites has grown exponentially along with an explosion in the volume of data we [...]
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Dan Collins on our move to virtualisation
August 18th, 2009 2 Comments
Our IT manager, Dan Collins, is in the Australian broadsheet today talking about our move over the last year to virtualisation of our servers. “We have got a much-reduced infrastructure spend in terms of the replacement cycle of hardware,” Mr Collins said. “When you look at what it saved us having to replace over three [...]
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How much is your website worth?
August 14th, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve noticed that I’ve been tweeting a lot of links rather than blogging them as I used to. And from time to time there are some links that need to be blogged to get to those who miss the tweets or don’t follow. Here’s one from the Web & Information Team at Lincolnshire County Council [...]
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Some clarifications on our experience with ‘free’ content
August 14th, 2009 1 Comment
Over on the Gov2 blog a comment was posted that asked for more information about our experience at the Powerhouse with ‘giving away content’ for free. I’d be interested to know more about your experience with Flickr and your resulting sales increase. Are these print sales or licensing sales? And are they sales, through your [...]
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Upcoming talks, workshops and presentations
August 13th, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve got a bunch of sector talks, workshops and presentations coming up over the next few months. I’ll be talking about some brand new (and right now, top secret) projects that focus on ‘linked data’, maps and the ‘Papernet’, as well as delving deeper into metrics, ‘value’ and digital strategy. So you just missed me [...]
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