Links of interest – November 2009

I’ve fallen into the now-familiar trap of posting interesting links on twitter and neglecting my blog, but twitter is currently so transitory I figure it’s worth collecting the links for perusal at your leisure. Sometimes I’ll take advantage of the luxury of having more than 140 characters and add comments [in brackets].

  • ‘vision video’ for Project Natal – lots of UX challenges but the hardware and software sound amazing already http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2009/06/project-natal.html [physical and gestural interfaces, spatial, facial recognition – all kinds of “we’re living in the future” stuff]
  • Museum website sharing… RT @LSpurdle: The project plan and final report for the Pre-Raphaelite project are here Pre-Raphaelite resource site
  • Thoughtful piece on twitter and nature of engagement at confs When Social Technologies Become AntiSocial (HT @jtrant) [part of an on-going debate about whether the ‘backchannel’ should be made public during conference presentations. My gut feeling is that it’s distracting, and as in this case, sometimes particularly unfair on the speaker. I do think twitter displays elsewhere in a conference work really well. The backchannel is so useful for all the social and peer connection stuff at conferences, but ultimately you’re in a session to listen to the speakers and most of us find concentrating on one thing for a long period of time difficult enough these days so might need all the help we can get.]
  • “Let’s make public speaking and public listening an art form.” spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective (HT @zambonini) [danah boyd’s perspective on the event that triggered the above post]
  • No public back channel – ‘My vote would be to take the toy away from the kids until they can act old enough to use it.’ http://bit.ly/2GbzmH [public back channel again]
  • research gems: ‘it’s like a vicious circle, except it’s not that vicious, it’s just a circle’ http://is.gd/53noQ [just plain funny]
  • Brilliant for cultural heritage RT @givp RT @yunilee Unbelievable software turns average webcam into 3D scanner. http://tinyurl.com/ykpzc2e [not real time, I assume – but it could be brilliant for quick and dirty object digitisation]
  • RT @dannybirchall: What do you think of my new website? http://www.wellcomecollection.org/
  • Nice one! RT @richbs: Beautiful visualisation of V&A Collections from The Times on Saturday
  • Academic Journal Racket – ‘the IOP Physics package … is costing us an amount close to the annual salary of a lecturer.’
  • advertisers don’t get it. Using personal profiles for marketing messages destroys the value of the platform A Friend’s Tweet Could Be an Ad
  • V cool! RT @marialgilbert: Esquire magazine’s current issue includes augmented reality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGwHQwgBzSI Consumer buys ‘key’ to content.
  • Aren’t museums already broadcasters, on the internet? Or does TV trump YouTube? “Museums and broadcasters must work together” [I do have a blind spot around the ‘museums as broadcasters’ idea – maybe I already take it as a given, or maybe it’s because I don’t have a TV? @NickPoole1 has been tweeting about it a bit, but I think I prefer ‘museums as platform’ to ‘museums as broadcasters’. Spaces for learning, discussion, reflection. Possibly related to Clay Shirky’s talk at the Smithsonian – ‘If you think of every artefact as a latent community, much of social values comes from convening platforms available for people to start sharing value in communities of practice. … If you think value is only things that you buy and manage and control… being a platform increases value for and the loyalty of the people who go there.’]
  • Blimey! RT @bus_tops: The Illustrated Man: How LED Tattoos Could Make Your Skin a Screen
  • Amazed by these stats ‘MSN Hotmail’s remained the most popular email service provider’ at 33%, Yahoo 14%, Gmail 6% [It really annoys me that Nomensa don’t link to the original source for their stories. They post great content, but it’s unusable without proper attribution]
  • Nice one! RT @museweb:Museums and the Web Copyright Form reworked as a non-exclusive license [related: “really enjoyed this post from @lisadempster http://tr.im/EPzH about her personal experience as author publishing with Creative Commons”]
  • This is ace, I love museum trails ‘Same-sex desire and gender identity‘ at the British Museum
  • Not sure about PDF but useful still RT @zambonini: Just discovered www.tweetdoc.org – an easy way of saving (PDF) twitter search results
  • BBC bows to SEO‘ – longer headlines on story pages, shorter on indexes for same stories
  • RT @coscultcom we’ve listened to your comments and changed our criteria – do one thing and do it well. More info at Cosmic Collections – do one thing and do it well
  • Fail! RT @bwyman: MS’s IE9 team blog post about standards and interoperability requires a silverlight install http://is.gd/4YjAP
  • RT @Wittylama: new blog: my recommendation to #GLAM for the #wikimedia collab. with highest return for lowest risk http://bit.ly/2FGKZT
  • interesting but terrifying ‘The future of entertainment: outside the box‘ vs ‘reasons why adults and teens use online networks‘ (and next slide)
  • thoughtful discussion of the post-release life and impact of a museum API http://bit.ly/2MPqEi from @brooklynmuseum
  • ace posts on visualising museum data http://tr.im/FbsD http://tr.im/FbsT (and built in reading list if you’re into infovis) on Museum Pipes [also on infographics, infovis: “infographics xkcd style http://xkcd.com/657/large/“]
  • RT @bathlander: You can now search all the public collections of the Smithsonian in one place! http://collections.si.edu 2.3 million records
  • I love this comic because a) it’s about coffee and b) it’s an ace infographic
  • NMI at Walker Art Center are my heroes ‘New Media kills in the Walker’s pumpkin carving contest’ http://bit.ly/1FGstB (HT @danielincandela)
  • EU says you must accept browser cookies?! http://is.gd/4SI4Y No way, urgh (HT @benosteen)
  • Hmm, wonder if I could hook online coll pages RT @lorcanD: Virtual International Authority File. Thom Hickey article. http://bit.ly/2HKf6X
  • RT @librarianbyday: If Your Patrons Continually Use Your Catalog the Wrong Way the Problem Isn’t Them http://bit.ly/R1eH (via @NancyProctor)
  • The ‘What is keeping women out of technology?’ article confuses ‘technology’ with ‘networking’ http://bit.ly/2hcLTz [The ‘phone, handbag’ thing is ridiculous – even if it’s true, it doesn’t matter why you don’t answer the phone, and I’m pretty sure we have some methods for asynchronous communication these days – ooh, like voicemail, email, direct message… It’s a shame the author doesn’t really get around to addressing his original question, except to say that he doesn’t want to hear any of the reasons commonly given. Why ask then?]
  • RT @gkob:funny how well @stefanomaz summarizes the triplification hype RT @sclopit: Data Smoke and Mirrors http://bit.ly/5fJv3
  • “this is my freaking HOUSE” – issues with ‘the gathering clouds of a location-based privacy storm’ http://tr.im/EvTX [and] social media makes your privacy leaky, because as careful as you are, even geek friends can be unsavvy about privacy and social media
  • RT @elyw: check out Museum Victoria’s new History & Technology collections online
  • Excellent insight into problems with large sites RT @bwyman: American Airlines fires UX designer for caring too much http://is.gd/4O6q2
  • I can’t believe this kid is only 16. ‘Digital Open Winners: Australian Teen Crafts “Sneaky” Games’ http://bit.ly/2FzBoz
  • no idea where this link came from so no HT but wow! AR with movable screen shows what church would look like un-destroyed http://tr.im/E4BM
  • A response to A N Wilson in the Mail ‘An uncertain scientist’s guide to taking risks’ http://tr.im/E4xP Also good on climate change action [earlier tweet: “Ha ha ha, hilarious article by A N Wilson about the trouble with scientists. http://bit.ly/3jCVUc HT @benosteen“]
  • such a simple but brilliant accessibility idea – magnifier application in Nokia phones for help with fine print http://is.gd/4McVg
  • Excellent post – IMA’s Rob Stein on benefits and challenges of transparency and museums http://is.gd/4McL8
  • ALA on websites for learners… they ‘need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable.’ http://bit.ly/2FfzSL
And stuff I really must find time to read properly:
Finally, a tweet about an interview with me about the Cosmic Collections competition.
I really should group those tweets and replace all the shortened links with the full URLs but it’s already taken a surprisingly long time to put this post together.

Nine days to go! And entering Cosmic Collections just got easier

Quoting myself over on the museum developers blog, Cosmic Collections – do one thing and do it well:

I’ve realised that there may be some mismatch between the way mashups tend to work, and the scope we’ve suggested for entries to our competition. The types of interfaces someone might produce with the API may lend themselves more to exploring one particular idea in depth than produce something suitable for the broadest range of our audiences.

So I’m proposing to change the scope for entries to the competition, to make it more realistic and a better experience for entrants: I’d like to ask you to build a section of a site, rather than a whole site. The scope for entrants would then be: “create something that does one thing, and does it well”. Our criteria – use of collections data, creativity, accessibility, user experience and ease of deployment and maintenance – are still important but we’ll consider them alongside the type of mashup you submit.

I’ve updated the Cosmic Collections competition page to reflect this change. This page also features a new ‘how to take part’ section, including a direct link to the API and to a discussion group.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this change – there’s an email address lurking on the competition page, and I’m on twitter @mia_out and @coscultcom.

In other news, programmableweb published a blog post about the competition today: Science Museum Opens API and Challenges Developers to Mashup the Cosmos. Woo!

And I don’t know if it’s any kind of consolation if you’re entering, but I’ll be working right alongside you up until Friday 28th, on an assignment for my MSc.

Organisational pain

If you work in a large organisation (or a cultural heritage organisation of almost any size), you may find cathartic release in reading this response to criticism of a large website from a member of its internal webteam:

…simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like.

As always, I’m not particularly pointing the finger at my own institution, but I’ve definitely been there. Cultural heritage institutions tend to have bonus! added! overload on web teams, so the list of improvements you want to make is always much longer than the resources you have available.