Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, Social-Media etc - Tracky Cat Purse Mobile or cloud

This post is a bit longer than usual as my holiday in Thailand revolved round eating, swimming and sleeping and very little in the way of anything else. I went with high hopes of working on some really pithy blog posts on mobile browsing v apps and museum work flows - but got completely sidetracked by nothing. The picture above was taken at Karon Bay, Thailand, reminded me of how simple offerings could be.

First Up like everyone else I have been paddling in the Pintrest pool see http://pinterest.com/grbarker/. While there are some really good potential uses for Museums it is also a bit clunky at the moment. Particularly the flatness of the the search engine function. I also think that while 'following' text-rolls works in twitter your 'following' pictures in pintrest quickly become chaotic and hard to read (particularly if you are seeking community feedback) - I would like to see the option of being able to feed followers pins into particular boards which I can create. As to content I think museums would be well advised to look at what people are interested in first before jumping in and creating boards based on the museums ideas. Apparently 70% of the demographic currently 18 – 44 females and there is an amazing consistancy across in this demographic about the boards they create - it's all about Animals, Home Renovation, Clothes, Cookery, Makeup, Colours and Patterns, Books. The other 30% mainly men from the same demographic appear equally consistant in their boards which revolve mainly around Home Renovation, Music, Cookery, Gadgets, Colours and Patterns.

Tracky Task Management - This is an interesting new startup which allows you work online by pulling together a wide variety of tasks like email, chat, task collab & file sharing into a private or public workspace. After creating groups tasks can be arranged around Tracks which can be used with a calender, chat, attach files and sub tracks. I signed up and while it has lots of potential its interface with groups and tracks was a little confusing. Othwerwise potentially a very useful working tool for team working publicly or privately - free online reg @ https://tracky.com/

Purse made out of a cat - creepy, but also fascinating: What Tinkebell did with her cat Pinkeltje she broke the neck of her sick cat and then made a handbag of her skin. The project was an artwork entitled My dearest cat and launched a discussion about hypocrisy. We simultaneously keep animals both as part of our families and as a commodity to be consumed. She uploaded a manual in which I described step by step "how to kill your cat", and how to turn it into a bag.

In a matter of days her mailbox was flooded with violent threats and death wishes which are now published in her new book - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/20/online-anonymity-death-threats

Five SEO Blogs - Some of the highest ranked Search Engine Optimisation blogs - http://searchengineland.com/ - http://www.seobook.com/blog - http://www.seomoz.org/blog - http://searchenginewatch.com - http://www.toprankblog.com/

500px is a photo community that lets you discover, share, buy and sell inspiring photographs. The first version of 500px came to light in the early days of digital photography. The 500px platform went through a number of revisions and changes, growing together with technology and photographers, and keeping focus on the highest quality photos. http://500px.com/

It's The Vinyl Countdown The Quietus is one of my favourite music magazines and if you like music this is a great read. Artists, from Jerry Dammers and Stewart Lee to Neneh Cherry, Aidan Moffat and Maria Minerva tell a story about their most treasured records. ... a flexi disc which was given away free with the legendary original punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. This is a song by the editor of that magazine Mark Perry's band Alternative TV, entitled ‘Love Lies Limp’. It wasn't just the Woolworth's cod reggae ... http://thequietus.com/articles/08539-record-store-day-my-favourite-vinyl

Educators Book Collection Recommendations at My Resource Cloud

Software for Digital Collections - an open document which is crowdsourcing a list of software available for use in managing and distributing Digital Collection resources https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ppg1_qfF73x0qDIFWrR37DF3ELGD1GAFsVjcxIYdDbo/edit

In The Mobile Frontier - Richael Hinman's slideshare explains how mobile is transforming the world and how we should embrace mobile as its own unique medium instead of simply translating traditional computing methods. http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/mobile/bdconf-richael-hinman-presents-the-mobile-frontier/

The Future Of IT Is Mobile And Cloud - Forbes article by Maribel Lopez - the president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions, John Stratton discussed how technology shifts would transform the IT landscape with a group of Industry Analysts. Verizon believes we’ve entered the next major era of computing that is based on cloud and mobility. Stratton said we experience a 10X growth in number of users with each wave computing. He told us that this wave will create a discontinuity in a company’s business processes and commercial models. http://www.forbes.com/sites/maribellopez/2012/04/18/verizons-stratton-the-future-of-it-is-mobile-and-cloud/

Opening up the Open Source Landscape - article by MICHAEL ASHERMAN - nice article on the ... complex maze of licenses and business models which relate to open source activity. Copyright law entitles programmers, like authors and artists, to exclusive control over the distribution and sale of their intellectual property, which includes source code. The value of source code is well recognized, but for competitive reasons software developers often are reluctant to include source at a reasonable price, if at all. Holding a diametrically opposite point of view, the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community contends that source code generally should be freely available, modifiable, and redistributable - read article

A Biographical Index of Nineteenth Century Pacific Photographers - finally did my first kindle publication you can see at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007QGJE2G

BryteWerks' Model One projector - DEMO turns out to have a range of Intel silicon at its disposal: everything from a humble 1.6GHz Atom up to a 3.6GHZ Core i7. There are also multiple storage options, as the Model One comes with an Intel 320 SSD (60 or 120GB) -- where the OS resides to ensure super fast boot times -- and up to a 2TB HDD - see http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/19/eyes-on-brytewerks-model-one-high-def-projector-and-htpc-combo/

Celebrity Upside Down photographs - aye .. aye .. aye .. the things we do http://www.freakingnews.com/Celebrities-Upside-Down-Pictures--2433.asp

5th Ave Frogger from Tyler DeAngelo on Vimeo.

5th Ave Frogger - Celebrating 30 year anniversary of Frogger, '5th Ave Frogger' is similar to the original, except the traffic you dodge in 5th Ave Frogger is actually traveling down 5th Ave in New York City as you play. http://vimeo.com/m/40653482 via @slashdot

Museums and the National Broadband Network Roll-Out in Australia

This post is based around a paper on the National Broadband Network (NBN) by Paul Brooks called Possibilities and pitfalls of universal competitive broadband .

According to Brooks’ the Federal Government’s NBN project , launched in April 2009, is expected to deliver optic cable to 93% of Australia and wireless and satellite to the remaining 7% by 2017. This network, expected to cost 43 billion dollars, is a wholesale only endeavour and as such is providing the infrastructure between the provider and the user but not the services.

Some of the benefits of the NBN are clear, current ADSL service slows down after 1km while fibre maintains full speed for up to 40 km and this means less transmitters and infrastructure cost. The up-stream speeds for ADSL are 1-2 megabits per second Mbps) while fibre optic cable can handle 100 to 1000 Mbps and can be upgraded to take even more data.

Fibre optic is also 1:1 symmetric which enables up-load and down-load speeds to be equal, this allows users to trust their services are capable of handling commercial business transactions, like hosting video conference without falling over.

The other point Brooks was clear to point out was that the NBN was limited to the infrastructure which supported end users and commercial service providers. The intent of the NBN is to sell access to the service, probably in the first instance to large wholesale companies who will then on-sell the services to thousands of new providers opening up a new realm of opportunities for business, and government agencies.

Aside from laying the cable the NBN will also install a box in every home, and these currently have four Ethernet and two PSTN ports. This will allow users to choose more than one provider, the example Brooks used was a person with an account with one provider could simultaneously test the services from another to compare services. While people will be able to hook up multiple devices such as a TV feed, a computer, and telephone Brooks also pointed out that people are currently using one device, the router, to service a number of devices around the home. The only problem with this current arrangement is that routers will need to be updated to take advantage of the four ports as currently they only have one connection out to the rest the world.

Another problem is how effective all this broadband will be when content delivered through its pipes then has to make its way into our lives through our WiFi routers much more limited bandwidth.

Even if these problems are solved I think there are an increasing number of issues relating to how useful broadband will be for the Museum sector, particularly when other other NPO's who already share many of their backend services like libraries, the education sector, and health can see real benefits from the data streamed through the NBN.

Personally I’m looking forward to the rollout of the NBN and the multitude of new options it will bring, especially for government funded bodies. Hospital & Community services; ABC and SBS feeds of interactive content; digital radio; video coferencing and educational content accessed by every house in Australia.

But Museum managers and peak bodies have not made it clear to me yet as to how NBN direct cable links to the services are going to differentiate themselves from mobile or from our existing network connections. Increasingly many of the online services offered by Museums are being directed to mobile solutions: exhibition, events, walking tours, data access, blogs, and these are not going to be serviced by the NBN. Given its going to be up to Museums to populate this space we still seem to be lagging behind the library community in thinking about what NBN services we need which can make use of the NBN. Currently this doesn't appear to be very clear?

Does anyone have any examples of museums making full use of broadband?

Anarchy in the 'A.U.’ the publication of the Anarchists Handbook in 1894

Woodcut for the cover of 'A Handbook of Anarchy' by J. A. Andrews, 1894, Powerhouse Museum, 2005/152/1

Way before the Sex Pistols came up with ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ Australia had its own band of anarchists working throughout the 1890s to undermine the political landscape. This hand-carved woodcut is a genuine slice of subversive Australian history and was used to produce the cover of the ‘Handbook of Anarchy’, published by John Arthur Andrews in July 1894.

The 1890s was a period of great social unrest with the country caught firmly in the grip of both adrought and a depression which forced many out of work. In October 1891 a new conservative government was elected and Andrews blamed it, and the wealthy bankers, for many of the country’s woes in a radical new publication entitled ‘Anarchy‘ a which like the later ‘handbook’ was printed from the hand cut-out wooden plates made by Andrews.

In July 1892 the ‘Broken Hill Strike’ began and police and armed troops were used to move non-strike labour into the mines. Waltzing Matilda was penned by Banjo Patterson in the wake of the events on Dagworth station during the shearing strike of 1894 and in the same year Andrews published what many consider his finest work ‘A Handbook of Anarchy’. Almost immediately Andrews and his fellow publishers, Wolfe and Robinson, were jailed, not for sedition, but apparently for not having a printer’s imprint correctly set on the book.

Print blocks for 'A Handbook of Anarchy, J. A. Andrews, 1894, Powerhouse Museum, 2005/152/3

Perhaps this was because the handbook was not quite the call to arms which the worried Australian Federal and State politicians thought it to be. It started with a definition that may have surprised, and confused, many if they had actually got a chance to read the limited print run. In his book Andrews defined ‘Anarchy' as freedom.

In Andrews' definition he described the word ‘free’ is to love or like; "... thus when we say that a man is free we imply that he is ‘to like’, that is, he has only to like in order to decide what he will do, or try to do. Among the things which people in general like, is to avoid hurting others."

In 1895 Andrews was again in jail on charges of sedition relating to another publication he was involved with called ‘Revolt’. Again the charges appear to have been hard to pin down as Andrews was freed in July 1895 after which he made his way back to Melbourne where he became involved in the Victorian Labour Federation. He died virtually destitute of tuberculosis in 1903 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Booroondara Cemetery.

References
Australian Dictionary of Biography 1891-1939, 69
'John Arthur Andrews', http://www.takver.com/history/raa/raa19.htm

Heist Pintrest You vs. Cat Helix Nebula

National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC. by O Palsson

Some Free Stock Photos Websites for using in your projects Dreamtime Stock Photos,Free Stock Photos .com, Stock Exchng,Deposit Photos.com, Flickr creative commons

I signed up this week for the GOOD Magazine as I thought this was a really nice alternative to the depressing litany of bad news focussed on by most news reporting channels - read here

Examples of how museums are using Pinterest: a tumbler post from Jennifer Fuchs on how 30+ museums are using Pinterest to showcase their collections. Post here

‘You vs. Cat’ - cat food maker Friskies has debuted their new iPad game called ‘You vs. Cat’ that pits cat owners against their pet. read

The first volume of International Journal of Heritage in the Digital Era well worth a look. download articles

We all know mobile technology has a huge uptake in the west but the take up in Africa is amazing. It is now claimed to be the 2nd largest mobile market by connections after Asia. Perhaps even more important is the way these countries are by-passing the PC and have gone straight into the hand-held digital environment - 90% of all phones in Africa are mobile phone - here no frills services like text messaging etc still play a huge role in business and getting things done. In Kenya 18 million people use mobile phone for their bank account transaction etc. read more at Presentation slideshow from TECHPRENEURWORLD -Resources for Technical Entrepreneurs in the Developing World

This is pretty cool toy gun attachment for your smartphone that lets you play shooter games in the real world. AppTag Laser Blaster

This is a nice article from Mashable Social Media on how to promote your institution on Pinterest. Most of these 10 strategies make good sense. read here

Industry Heavies Unite to Float "the Science Cloud" called Helix Nebula - more than a dozen international IT firms have partnered to create Helix Nebula - The Science Cloud, which will be used by European researchers to provide cloud-based computing support for scientific discoveries.article here

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. Sean Carroll just completed a multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time and gives his stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. see here

Stanford researchers create exotic electrons that may lead to new materials, devices. "Our new approach is a powerful new test bed for physics," Manoharan said. "Molecular graphene is just the first in a series of possible designer structures. We expect that our research will ultimately identify new nanoscale materials with useful electronic properties." see here

A year-long undercover investigation has found evidence of Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) companies cutting and pulping legally protected ramin trees, a practice that violates both Indonesian and international law. Found largely in Sumatra's peatswamp forests, the logging of ramin trees (in the genus Gonystylus) has been banned in Indonesia since 2001; the trees are also listed under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and thus require special permits to export. see full article

Heist is an experimental project that uses Open Exhibits and GestureWorks software and is powered by Sensus server technology to enable effortless networking. Digital museum objects can be easily shared with visitor's smart phones or tablets. All this happens without visitors having to download a mobile app. Heist uses a WiFi captive portal; as museum visitors connect to the network they are pushed an HTML 5 application. They simply add their name, pick a color and their personal avatar appears on the table.

Lytro Article by By Joshua Goldman - the good news: creates photos that you can refocus again and again--after you've shot them--opening up new creative possibilities. the bad news: proprietary Lytro image file format can only be processed and edited with Lytro's so-far Mac-only software, and if you want to share images you need to use Lytro's site. Its LCD is poor for such an otherwise high-end device. see review and pictures

John Coltrane, Frank Kofsky Interview 1966 Part 1

14-year-old constructs a LEGO printer - Leon Overwheel, who lives in New York, has constructed a printer out of LEGO blocks which he dubbed the LEGO Mindstorms NXT Printer http://designtaxi.com/news/351768/14-Year-Old-Constructs-A-LEGO-Printer/

Nice resource - How to Capture Audio & Video in HTML5: Audio/Video capture has been the "Holy Grail" of web development for a long time. For many years we've had to rely on browser plugins (Flash or Silverlight) to get the job done. HTML5 to the rescue. It might not be apparent, but the rise of HTML5 has brought a surge of access to device hardware. Geolocation (GPS), the Orientation API (accelerometer), WebGL (GPU), and the Web Audio API (audio hardware) are perfect examples. These features are ridiculously powerful, exposing high level JavaScript APIs that sit on top of the system's underlying hardware capabilities. This nice tutorial by Eric Bidelman introduces a new API, navigator.getUserMedia(), which allows web apps to access a user's camera and microphone.

Article - Extending copyright exceptions for preservation - intellect property & O/S group outline case here

29 Useful And Free Thin Fonts Download

All Coherence Gone - the future of museum collections

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;

AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD, John Donne, 1611.


I heard this quote the other day on my way to work and it seemed as apt now as it did when Keppler's discovery that the earth was not in fact the centre of the universe shattered contemporary belief systems and sciences. Today it could be argued that the changes wrought by new digital technologies are having a comparable effect, atomising the present into ... pieces, all coherence gone, all just supply, and all relation. This global phenomenon affects all kinds of institutions from the banking sector and the motor industry to governments and not-for-profits, but how do museums, those perceived bastions of the past, stack up in the face of these changes.

Museums, as repositories of the past, are tempting to place at arms length from these rapid contemporary changes but in fact it could be argued that they are a 'canary in the cage' industry testing the atmosphere of change. Why? Well one reason could be that the concept of the Museum is one of those most challenged by the rapid changes in the social fabric associated with Twitter, GeoCommons, cloud computing, and Flickr. What is at stake for museums is one of the most fundamental reasons for any institutions existence, its relevancy. Over the last 40 to 50 years the once hallowed status of collections and objects has been continually challenged as exhibition models, educational courses, online databases, citizen-science, and of course the ubiquitous proliferation of information across the internet reshapes museum models, and staff work-flows, in answer to challenges from funding bodies, industry and the public to become more directly involved in community outcomes.

Our successes and failures in dealing with these pressures would probably be no greater or less than many other government funded institutions, and NFP's, were it not for that one thing that defines, and differentiates, us from so many other community services. THE COLLECTIONS. Truly they are the elephant in the room - huge, costly, capable of growing to a great age, and in many respects unlike any thing else on the planet. These collections, built up over a hundred or more years reflect a complexity, outwardly and internally, that is hard for any one person to grasp. Indeed many people, and even some museums themselves, seem to have little desire to understand the scope, size, and usefulness of these collections. Yet somehow, above all the storage and display issues, the insurance costs, and the new acquisitions there seems to be an inherent trust and belief that they are somehow important and this goodwill continues to be bequeathed across generations.

But this inheritance is not of the tangible kind, in fact it appears to be more like a barely articulated thought in most people's heads. And this is not just the general public we are talking about for many museum professionals also seem to find it hard to articulate a coherent reasoning for their collections existence. A problem exacerbated by the 20th century project of atomising the functions of the museum into specialised departments, many of which barely come in contact with the collections which formed the justification for their existence.

So we find ourselves at the beginning of a new century, amidst massive technological change, surrounded by new vehicles for delivering: educational content, Exploratorium experiences, visual and aural interaction, and access to the worlds knowledge. All of which impinge on the areas once dominated by the Museum. Against this formidable array of challenges we find ourselves armed with a barely articulated notion of the Museum residing mainly in our communal heads, and a vast array of objects from the arcane to the commonplace.

Thinking about it though, this is pretty good, in fact its real head start on many other institutions. It's incredible really that despite many efforts, internal and external, that museums have yet to squander this cache - but, and this is the big BUT, I feel we must start finding new ways of using both our collections and our place in society to articulate why the past is essential for making coherence of our present and step forward into the future.

Social networking, digitisation, educational programs, Blockbuster and other non-collection driven exhibitions, all are fine. But alone they are not enough to define the relevance of the museum as a cultural institution. Attempts fashion a future which excludes Museum collections and/or the architectural and contextual edifice currently standing stalwart in the face of change will inevitably diminish this cache until perhaps it is, as Donne suggests, ... all in pieces, all coherence gone.

Raspberry Pi 3D Exhibits Orphan Works

I posted an article on Australian Picture Postcards this week - it gives a bit of background to the collection and development of the use of photographs on these cards in Australia.



Rasberry pi
- this looks amazing - a small $25 computer which is credit card size. It has lots of potential for museum programs as it runs on linux and is pre-loaded with scratch. It runs off a mobile phone power cord and can be plugged into computer and TV displays. purchase info

Nice Article/Tutorial by Eric Bidelman - Audio Video Capture without the plugins
... HTML5 has brought a surge of access to device hardware. Geolocation (GPS), the Orientation API (accelerometer), WebGL (GPU), and the Web Audio API (audio hardware) are perfect examples. These features are ridiculously powerful, exposing high level JavaScript APIs that sit on top of the system's underlying hardware capabilities. Many people recognised the need to be able to access native devices on the web, but that led everyone putting together a new spec. W3C finally decided to form a working group. Their sole purpose? Make sense of the madness! The Device APIs Policy (DAP) Working Group has been tasked to consolidate + standardize the plethora of proposals.

Eric's tutorial covers some history of its development and introduces a new API, navigator.getUserMedia(), which allows web apps to access a user's camera and microphone. see tutorial

Twitter has sold a bunch of old tweets
... to a firm called DataSift, which will analyze them for marketing purposes. see Mashable article

Museums love teenagers, but only if they are in uniform
- this article was a bit of bad Museum related publicity in the Guardian for the Salford Museum. It was based on their decision to throw out two teenagers "for their own safety" because they'd gone without an adult - The Gauardian states ... I don't for one minute believe the museum's action was prompted by concern for any child. If that were the case, why would they propel two girls into the streets of a busy town to wander across roads all on their own among total strangers? And sadly Salford isn't the only museum to discriminate against young people; many have similar bans. full article

This is a very cool project covered by Wired Magazine
- Paris Artist Collective uses stolen map of underground tunnels to access buildings & repair cultural artifacts - see Wired article

Smithsonian museums use 3D printing to share exhibits
... but would u go to gallry to see photos of art works however there are questions as to whether the public will warm to 3D copies in favour of the original objects - New Scientist article

Copyright - Dealing With Orphan works
- this was a nice article by Martin Brassell on the current copyright consultation exercise and its provisions to address the problems associated with ‘orphan works’ – those without a recognised owner. This article summarises the key arguments for change and the questions which arise from it. see article

Infographic
- Did you know that every 60 seconds Twitter sees (on average) 175,000 new tweets? Or that over that same time period, Pinterest receives 1,090 visitors, LinkedIn absorbs 7,610 searches and Flickr users upload 3,125 photos? see infographic

Dr Who Monopoly set anyone?
Bueller? limited edition to celebrate 50th anniversary - can I resist the temptation? - see

Collections in the clouds – Mythical Beast

Q. What is plastic, metal and glass – coloured black, white and brown – covered in hair – and made out of over 600,000 modular parts?
A. The Powerhouse Museum.