Oil sponsors? Twitter? Stop that, museums.

I can think of no justification whatsoever for a museum to be accepting sponsorship from an oil company in this day and age. It was embarrassing back in 2000 when I first joined the sector to see Shell / BP / Equinor / BNFL sponsoring galleries, exhibitions, exhibits and interactives. The “but the museum has … Read more

Introducing Mobile Museum

I’m ramping up to launch a sister site to this one. It’s called Mobile Museum and will be a series of semi-structured written interviews with people who have developed, authored or project-managed mobile solutions. Some of these people will be museum people, others won’t… If you’re interested you can find out more over on http://mobilemuseum.org.uk/ where there’s … Read more

WordPress culture hackday, anyone?

A long and interesting thread on the MCG list prompted a thought – how about a WordPress hack-and-knowledge-sharing-kinda-day for culture? We could talk about stuff like: best approaches and favourite plugins ways to hook into existing systems like Omeka building some simple plugins to interface with CH open data building some simple plugins to interface … Read more

QR isn’t an end, it’s a means

QR seems to have taken on a bit of a life of its own over the past few weeks. Not only have I seen far more of the codes in the wild, but there seems to be many more people writing about it, many more news articles – and also (which is nice) – lots … Read more

What to do about Facebook?

Ah, Facebook. On the one hand: …this is the single most dynamic, engaged and engaging platform for user generated content that there has ever been. 500 million people, converging on a single web application. Wait, read that again – 500 MILLION people. That’s a noticeable chunk of the entire global population. That’s a totally, utterly … Read more

Going freelance

I’m delighted and terrified (in pretty much equal measures) to announce that at the end of June 2011 I’ll be leaving my current employer Eduserv, and heading out into the wilderness of the freelancer. As with any move, I’ll be very sad to leave the fine people I’ve been working so closely with but I’m … Read more

What if Twitter goes rogue?

Since the dawn of Twitter, the big question about the micro-blogging service has always been “but how will they make money?”. To date, Twitter have taken a now-very-typical approach to this: rely on funding to grow a massive, engaged and dynamic community without worrying about the money, and then once the community is in place, … Read more

Writing a book

As you might have noticed, things have been kind of quiet around here on the Electronic Museum blog. Two big things have been occupying me recently and form the basis for my non-blogging excuse. One: I just co-organised a ridiculously exciting mobile conference in Bath called The Big M. I won’t talk about this more … Read more

It’s all about the communication

Here’s a story for you: Once upon a time there was a man who bought some hosting. He bought it because he liked the flexibility, freedom and functionality that it offered. He bought it knowing that it was cheap, and that cheap sometimes means compromise: he did this because he isn’t terribly rich, and decided … Read more

Strategic digital marketing: don’t be dis(integrated)

I was asked to speak at At-Bristol recently at a gathering of marketing people from the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres. The topic of choice was strategic marketing. Now, as I made it clear on the day, I’m not – officially, at least – a “marketing person”. Nonetheless, I’ve spent more than a decade … Read more