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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
Imagine a web application as it should appear in 2010. Now lower your expectations in absolutely every way. Design? Absolutely terrible. We’re talking default and mixed fonts, no thought given to typography, spacing. Bad 1995 animated GIFs scattered around. Terrible Photoshop, or more likely MS Paint skills – that kind of gratuitous dropshadowbeveladdsomesunglareandanotherlayer thing you … Read more
I’ve posted a page about how I built the museum directory mashup which I demonstrated during my talk at the UK Museums on the Web conference last week. This started off as a KML file for displaying UK museums on Google Earth but the natural direction was to push it into a simple framework which … Read more
Tom Scheinfeldt contacted me through a comment on the Electronic Museum blog. He’s MD of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) who among other things produce Zotero – a kind of semantic webby bookmarking toolbar. CHNM have recently produced an open source application called Omeka (Swahili for “to display or lay out goods … Read more
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
Ok. It’s opening plenary time here at Museums and the Web 2008. I didn’t manage to do any blogging yesterday – that’s what an entire day of workshops followed by immediate dinner and wine does to you… Michael Geist is the guest speaker: “technology advocate and trouble maker”. I like him already 🙂 Michael spent … Read more
The word “nerd” is a bit disappointing. I mean, nerds rule the world, of course, but still it feels a bit dismissive. Anyway, I’m slowly growing a list of projects here which I’ll flesh out in more detail where it might be interesting to do so. Almost of all of them are half-baked and never … Read more
I said on a previous post that I’d write more about Simon Wardley’s excellent presentation at the Future of Web Apps conference. He’s now put the presentation on Slideshare but warns (and he’s right) that it’s not an easy one to digest without the audio. Apparently FOWA are going to be publishing the sound for … 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
I got involved with Netvibes a long time ago, first as a user and then briefly when I helped them out with some dodgy English translations. That’s how I came to be invited to set up a Netvibes Universe before the beta was opened to the public. If you haven’t used or come across Netvibes, … Read more