What with Gordon Brown’s recent (just an hour or so ago) announcement of lots of digital goodness at the “Building Britain’s Digital Future” event, the focus sharpens once again on Linked Data. I’ve been sitting on the sidelines sniping gently at Linked Data since it apparently replaced the Semantic Web as The Next Big Thing. … Read more
I first wrote about hoard.it, the bootstrapped “API spider” that Dan Zambonini and I built, back in 2008. We followed up the technology with a paper for Museums and the Web 2009, and in that paper talked about some possible future directions for the service. You’ll see if you scroll down the paper that there … Read more
I gave a presentation recently at UK Museums on the Web entitled “The Intertubes Everywhere”. It was a re-working of my Ignite Cardiff talk, with a gentle angle towards cultural heritage. Here are the slides: [slideshare id=2742484&doc=theintertubeseverywhere-091218044628-phpapp02] The one-liner for those that don’t have the time to go through the slides is something like this: … Read more
Last week was the annual UK Museums on the Web conference. Things were particularly hectic and exciting for me this year for a whole host of reasons: We launched a new MCG website in the week before the conference – this was a full migration to WordPress MU which I’ll write more about shortly; We were working behind … Read more
I’m absolutely delighted (and only slightly scared) to announce that I’ve been commissioned to write a book for Facet Publishing. Ever since I started working with museums online, I’ve felt that there is a need for strategic advice to help managers of cultural heritage web presences. There are of course hundreds of thousands of resources … Read more
I’m delighted to announce the beginning of what I hope will be an exciting (and useful!) mini-project. Museuminaday is a concept which Dan Zambonini and I have come up with to support our workshop “The Lightweight Museum” at the DISH conference in December. Hopefully the name should do most of the work in explaining what … Read more
Let’s ask this: Just what do museum website users want? Actually, before we do that, the biggest question is “who is our audience?”. Wait. Before we do that, let’s assume that – what – 70-80% of museum website users want to find out some logistical stuff: “what’s on? how do I get there? how much … Read more
I first joined Twitter in 2007. In fact, if www.whendidyoujointwitter.com is correct, I joined on 20th February 2007. My first account was @dmje. I tweeted in that way that everyone seems to first tweet – a sporadic few “just what the hell is this Twitter thing all about?” followed by a long gap, followed by … Read more
There’s acres and acres of stuff to read and write about the whole National Portrait Gallery legal action threat against Wikimedia contributor Dcoetzee and his addition to the Wikimedia collection. I’m not going to try and add to the noise too much but it would seem apposite to at least comment given my current thread … Read more
The week before last (30th June – 1st July 2009), I was at the JISC Digital Content Conference having been asked to take part in one of their parallel sessions. I thought I’d use the session to talk about something I’m increasingly interested in – the shifting of the message about machine readable data (think … Read more