On June 18th 2008 (the day before UK Museums on the Web conference) a bunch of us met in a room at Leicester University to do some museum mashing. Our aim was:
” …to give ourselves an environment free from political or monetary constraints. The focus of the day is not IPR, copyright, funding or museum politics. Our energies will be channeled into embracing the “new web”: envisaging, demonstrating and (hopefully) building some lightweight distributed applications. “
I thought I’d borrow Matt’s N95 and do a quick “interview” (loose term) of everyone that wanted to say something about what they’d done. Finally last night I got round to chucking this into Window’s Movie Maker and doing some editing and have uploaded the result to http://blip.tv/file/1029060. It’s around 12 minutes long, so grab a cuppa and a comfy chair…
Finished?
The following day I did a presentation at the conference itself. This is now on Slideshare (and embedded below)
[slideshare id=488768&doc=ukmw08mashedmuseum-1214573625065381-9&w=425]
I’d just like to say thanks loads to everyone who attended – I know giving up a day is always problematic (even if it involves beer at the end). I hope you had fun. I know I did. Also enormous thanks to Ross Parry and the MCG for giving us the opportunity to do this.
Several people who attended have written about / linked to the things we built:
- Jim O’Donnell did some nice stuff with Yahoo! and RSS – see his demos of a tagged RSS feed, browsing by tag and browsing by object
- Brian Kelly played about with PicLens – see his coverage on the UK Web Focus site
- Daniel Pett blogged about what he got up to over here
- Steve Pope used his OpenCalais helper to mashup some hoard.it data with Flickr and Amazon
- Frankie Roberto did some very cool stuff with Freebase (my coverage here) and the MIT Simile Timeline
- Fiona Romeo used the awesome Many Eyes visualisation tool on some data she had…
- ..and I built an SMS thing in the morning (but gave up as we had no mobile coverage..) and a very simple mystery object game (again based on hoard.it data) in the afternoon. (deliberate error: the right answer is always the first one…damn…)
(I’ll also be continuing to update www.mashedmuseum.org.uk with future museummashingmoments…)
The message? Well, Lee Iverson from the Univerity of British Columbia used a phrase during his presentation the following day to beautifully encapsulate what I’ve posted about so, so often – and the one thing that makes any mashups possible:
“If you expose data, you lose control but give it life“
And that pretty much sums it up.