Mike Ellis

Nothing whatsoever to do with museums, but this made me laugh. Genius, inspired idea:

My Clash of the Networks post has got a bunch of traffic – not surprising really – underlying this is an emotive issue which all museums, and probably most technologists, struggle with. Mike Lowndes (ex NHM Website Manager) has opened up a thread in the comments which expands the “should we free our data?” question … Read more

I’ve been very interested for some time in how you might go about tracking objects around a space, but I haven’t yet had a conversation with anyone in a museum who has actually done it. This could well be because it isn’t yet do-able, or more likely I just haven’t found the right people to … Read more

I’m fairly sure I stole that title off someone, or maybe a bunch of someones. Let’s hope it’s Creative Commons. Anyway, it’s one of the things I bang on about a lot of the time – bridging the gap between the virtual world (“sit forward, single-focus, move mouse, engage”) and the real (“sit back, multi-focus, … Read more

With the opening of the Facebook Platform a war has broken out, with the two sides aligned with similar views to the ones we talked about at Museums and the Web. On the one hand is MySpace, the rambling, ugly behemoth with over 100 million accounts, a closed database of users and no API. On … Read more

Jakob Nielsen, apparent guru of accessibility and usability, has been getting his teeth into Web 2.0, in particular the issues around AJAX and what it does to the user experience. I think this is a very interesting area – Brian and I picked up on it in our paper for Museums and the Web: “…couple … Read more

“A fully engaging, sensory experience for guests. Murals and realistic scenery, computer-generated visual effects, over fifty exotic animals, life-sized people and dinosaur animatronics, and a special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats.” Sounds good? Yeah. I thought so, too. Until you look at the topic matter or the URL: http://www.creationmuseum.org Apparently $27 … Read more

I got a sign-in for the alpha release Freebase a few days ago and I’m pretty interested in what I’ve seen. Freebase is, to quote a couple of commentators: “possibly the most exciting thing to happen to the web for some time”. Or, as TechCrunch put it: “This is cool, unless it achieves consciousness and … Read more

Anyone who is in any doubt about the power of the social web or, specifically, blogging, should take a look at the graph on the left. This was the moment that Engadget’s Ryan Block posted that Apple’s iPhone was going to be delayed by several months. In six minutes, $4 Billion dollars was wiped off … Read more

Two things got a load of coverage this week which should – for very different reasons – be getting us museum types excited. First off, Google analytics launched a new version which is being rolled out for existing users. Seb Chan mentioned it on a recent post and also links to a couple of introductory … Read more