While I srongly agree with yr position Mike, I have to go some of the way with Nick P on this: most museums struggle to get the basics right, so to embrace the move to ‘web as platform’ is asking quite a lot of a rather ‘traditional’ sector.

I can see that science museums and centres are often going to be the innovators here – and its great to have such innovation.

I’d like to see the beginnings of a nationwide platform that smaller museums can use to take advantage of some of this stuff , without needing in-house tech skills. Technically it is not such a challenge; funding and politics – wise I refer you to Nick. To paraphrase and ‘tweak’ him – should we suffer a 2 year lack of distributed development funds so a focus can be brougt to this issue at a national level?