Mike Mike Mike… it’s very disheartening and offensive to hear someone be so needlessly nasty and critical of a project that we’ve worked so very hard on.

There is of course a better way of expressing your feelings about this. A more mature and human way. See project http://www.pastthinking.com/

Reading your rant makes it very obvious you know very little about this project and it’s obvious your entire argument revolves around advertising the not-so-impressive hoard.it app.

As I’ve mentioned before any mediocre developer can build a scraper and API but what you’re failing to realise is that there’s so much more that goes into building a museum product. For one thing hoard.it does not address copyright issues and in reality that app wouldn’t stand a chance of ever becoming a real life application in the museum world. It’s all very easy to hack a few lines of code together and say “see? that wasn’t so hard”.

I suggest you speak to the NMOLP team first, learn about the project and find out how the money was spent before comparing it to Europeana and claiming £2mil of taxpayers money was wasted on it. You want an API? No problem, try and get copyright clearance from every single artists and owner of the collections first, then we can build it.

Posting one-liners like “why?” on the MCG mailing list doesn’t exactly help us put your tax money to use, does it? The site is still in Beta mode and there’s plenty of room for improvement and we’re more than happy to hear your feedback so play nice and help us make this a good product.

Giv