electronic museum

A lot of rumbling about the noise created by the (social) web has been reaching our ears recently. I’m not in this instance talking about the management of “outgoing” social media but more about how people deal with the sheer quantity of stuff which is arriving through various channels. The news feeds, tweets, emails, IM - all are part of the incoming stream. Then of course there are conversations with people in the real world (gasp!), paper-based print, TV and so on.

Fundamental, of course, to any conversation about technology is that you are ultimately destined to fail, if you’re hoping to know everything. I’ve been following the conversation at a sprint for more than ten years now and like to think that I’ve got a reasonably good grasp of the web technologies out there, but it doesn’t take a genius to recognise that the speed of change is so intense that we’re all going to get left behind sooner or later. Those who have tried particularly hard to keep up have suffered because of it - Om Malik’s heart attack and the death of Russell Shaw are pretty well publicised. While much of the media are swinging off in what is obviously ridiculous “blogging kills you” type directions, there are still some lessons. We’re all getting older (goddamit) and sooner or later we’ll be that “back in the days of X command-line interface, when the world was rosy” IT bod in meetings. Get used to it. I’m almost there already - remember the…NO, STOP..

There’s a tendency I’ve noticed when some are faced with this craziness: ostrich the problem. The argument is articulated like this: “With so much noise, maybe we’d be better off just not doing anything“. It’s either a conscious decision, or a rabbit-stuck-in-headlights paralysis. Either way, to me it’s always been the most spurious of positions to take. To steal and adapt (CC-styley!) a well-known phrase:

“where there is noise, there is signal”

Choosing to actively run away from the noise - to “not do the social web because it’s too noisy” is a hugely perverse argument. Yes, there is noise and hype…no, Twitter probably won’t last..no, you shouldn’t be on Facebook just because you can…but the point as far as I see it is this: the social web has signal far above the hype: signal far stronger than the noise, provided you can take a step backwards and look at the direction of travel rather than the individual paths being walked. The social web is important because it lets us connect, not because it lets us tweet.

There’s no doubt that the noise is intense - unfiltered, it is way more than most of us can cope with. Here’s a (probably incomplete) list of my current inputs. Every one of them is a stream of information but also a potential distraction, red herring, attention-grabber, too:

email (Outlook), email (Gmail), twitter (via twhirl), IM (Google Talk), IM (MSN), IM (Skype), phone (mobile), phone (desk), phone (skype), feeds (google reader), “the web”, …not forgetting conversations with real people…

I may be in the upper quartile of “wiredness” but I’ll bet most of you are exposed to these, and some possibly more.

As many commentators have pointed out, as the noise continues to grow (which it will), the signal to noise ratio drops and the need for us to find mediated experiences will become ever more important. My good friend Dan Zambonini pointed me to this excellent blog post by Kevin Kelly. Here’s a quote:

“I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.”

He’s right of course - the lesson that we all take away is that although the technologies get more “intelligent” (dare I say, “Semantic”..?), the noise is probably increasing at a far greater rate. Net result - at least a cancelling-out of the “filtered benefit” and more likely - just more and more noise.

The human author - the topdown influence in Kelly’s post - is the conduit by which everything is managed. This role isn’t going anywhere, but it’s easy to forget this when we’re all getting excited about the machine -processable web, the API, Twitter and so on.

The human element is always going to be the single most important thing in the equation, which is exactly why the social web is so important, and can’t - or won’t - be ostriched.

I’m off to the 2008 Foundation Symposium tomorrow, a day of asking: “what do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?…”

The programme and speakers look pretty good - Larry Johnson from NMC and Jem Stone from the Beeb to mention but a couple of the better known names.

Andy, Pete and Ed from the Foundation are trying out a bunch of interesting stuff to support the conference backchannel. For starters they’ve set up a Ning iteration at http://efsym2008.ning.com/ which, as Andy and I point out in the comments, is (at the least) pretty useful in this day and age to put a face to the virtual contacts we’ve all made via Twitter, IM and blogging. Ning for me has really risen in importance as a social media platform to be taken seriously since they solidified their API and developer network…

Next off, they’ll be streaming live video from the event, so if you can’t make it you can catch our ugly mugs on the Eduserv website. On the same page there is also a live chat facility as provided by CoverItLive. I’ve been roped in to pick questions and shout them out during the QA’s after each session. So be nice and I might just let you ask something

Last but not least, OneTag will be in operation with a slideshow and mobile version of everything tagged efsym2008.

All in all, it’s going to be fun. And an early start, so I’m off to bed. See you there (or not) tomorrow.

I just sat through an excellent session by Steph Mastoris from the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea.

They’ve got a 35 million pound museum here, and it’s been built with new media at its core. Some of the interactives here are very cool (wave your arms and spin a virtual object); others are a bit more pedestrian and a couple are, frankly, slightly baffling.

The point - as illustrated by the extraordinary statistic that the museum spends £27k a year (wait for it) on projector bulbs (!) - is that new media is a vital component to interpretation here.

So far, so good. But Steph then pulled up a slide about the issues: changing those lightbulbs, for one - but also the notion of identifying critical paths. And the one example he used (hence the title to this post) was that the cooling system for the museum relies wholly on waterflow from the Swansea marina. So when “15 condoms and a dead dog” (Steph’s words..) get stuck in the water intake, the cooling fails, the servers crash, the museum interactives go down.

The point (apart from a great post title): the critical path for your IT systems may be somewhere you least expect it, and that path might be nothing whatsoever to do with technology…

Nothing quite like leaping in and doing something before sorting out any of the details, but I’m hoping to organise a barcamp type moment in the Bath vicinity sometime during summer 2008.

I’m actually possibly the worst person to do anything with such enormous logistical overhead, but as long as I remain confident, calm and don’t tell anyone that I don’t know what I’m doing, then everything will turn out ok. I also have a very fine set of people who are up for helping, including my wife, who loves this sort of thing.

Anyway.

What: some kind of barcamp event;
Where: Bath or very close nearby
When: A Saturday (+night) sometime late summer 2008

If I’ve managed to pique your interest enough with this genius bit of marketing that tells you neither what, when nor where exactly then please head over to http://bathcamp.org and register your details. I’ve also added an entry to the barcamp wiki at http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampBath.

Once I’ve got some measure of the numbers I’ll start refining dates, venues and content - sorry! structure

Look forward to hearing from you!

It’s hard not to be fascinated by the emerging and developing conversations around museums and the Semantic Web. Museums, apart from anything else, have lots of stuff, and a constant problem finding ways of intelligently presenting and cross-linking that stuff. Search is ok if you know what you’re looking for but browse as an alternative is usually a terribly pedestrian experience, failing to match the serendipity and excitement you get in a physical exhibition or gallery.

During the Museums and the Web conference, there was a tangible thread of conversation and thought around the API’d museum, better ways of doing search, and varied opinions about openness and commerce, but always there was the endless tinnitus of the semantic web never far away from people’s consciousnesses.

As well as the ongoing conversation, there were some planned moments as well, among them a workshop run by Eric Miller (ex. W3C sem web guru), Ross Parry’s presentation and discussion of the “Cultural Semantic Web” AHRC-funded think tank and the coolness of Open Calais being applied to museum collections data by Seb Chan at the Powerhouse (article on ReadWrite Web here - nice one Seb!).

During the week I also spent some time hanging out with George Oates and Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr, and it’s really from their experiences that some thoughts started to emerge which I’ve been massaging to the surface ever since.

Over a bunch of drinks, George told me a couple of fairly mind-blowing statistics about the quantity of data on Flickr: more than 2 billion images which are being uploaded at a rate of more than 3 million a day….

What comes with these uploads is data - huge, vast, obscene quantities of data - tags, users, comments, links. And that vat of information has a value which is hugely amplified because of the sheer volume of stuff.

To take an example: at the individual tag level, the flaws of misspellings and inaccuracies are annoying and troublesome, but at a meta level these inaccuracies are ironed out; flattened by sheer mass: a kind of bell-curve peak of correctness. At the same time, inferences can be drawn from the connections and proximity of tags. If the word “cat” appears consistently - in millions and millions of data items - next to the word “kitten” then the system can start to make some assumptions about the related meaning of those words. Out of the apparent chaos of the folksonomy - the lack of formal vocabulary, the anti-taxonomy - comes a higher-level order. Seb put it the other way round by talking about the “shanty towns” of museum data: “examine order and you see chaos”.

The total “value” of the data, in other words, really is way, way greater than the sum of the parts.

This is massively, almost unconceivably powerful. I talked with Aaron about how this might one day be released as a Flickr API: a way of querying the “clusters” in order to get further meaning from phrases or words submitted. He remained understandably tight-lipped about the future of Flickr, but conceptually this is an important idea, and leads the thinking in some interesting directions.

On the web, the idea of the wisdom of crowds or massively distributed systems are hardly new. We really is better than me.

I got thinking about how this can all be applied to the Semantic Web. It increasingly strikes me that the distributed nature of the machine processable, API-accessible web carries many similar hallmarks. Each of those distributed systems - the Yahoo! Content Analysis API, the Google postcode lookup, Open Calais - are essentially dumb systems. But hook them together; start to patch the entire thing into a distributed framework, and things take on an entirely different complexion.

I’ve supped many beers with many people over “The Semantic Web”. Some have been hardcore RDF types - with whom I usually lose track at about paragraph three of our conversation, but stumble blindly on in true “just be confident, hopefully no-one will notice you don’t know what you’re talking about” style. Others have been more “like me” - in favour of the lightweight, top-down, “easy” approach. Many people I’ve talked to have simply not been given (or able to give) any good examples of what or why - and the enduring (by now slightly stinky, embarassing and altogether fishy) albatross around the neck of anything SW is that no-one seems to be doing it in ways that anyone ~even vaguely normal~ can understand.

Here’s what I’m starting to gnaw at: maybe it’s here. Maybe if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck (as per the recent Becta report by Emma Tonkin at UKOLN) then it really is a duck. Maybe the machine-processable web that we see in mashups, API’s, RSS, microformats - the so-called “lightweight” stuff that I’m forever writing about - maybe that’s all we need. Like the widely accepted notion of scale and we-ness in the social and tagged web, perhaps these dumb synapses when put together are enough to give us the collective intelligence - the Semantic Web - that we have talked and written about for so long.

Here’s a wonderful quote from Emma’s paper to finish:

“By ‘semantic’, Berners-Lee means nothing more than ‘machine processable’. The choice of nomenclature is a primary cause of confusion on both sides of the debate. It is unfortunate that the effort was not named ‘the machineprocessable web’ instead.”

Ok. Obviously the intention was to live-blog the sessions I went to during Museums and the Web, but in the end it all comes down (unfortunately) to time, of which there simply isn’t enough (except when waiting for a damn plane). I’m working on an API using a RESTful approach to sort this out but I’m having trouble with the bending of spacetime and a glitch in vbscript which means you can’t get at the right bit of the EnergyEquivalence 2.0 DOM. Bear with me. Maybe it’s better in Ruby…

Anyway. Here’s some highlights for me, in rough order of appearance:

No API? FOI…

Frankie Roberto (Science Museum) and Seb Chan (Powerhouse) gave a hugely entertaining and interesting talk within the topic area “Aggregating Museum Data”. David Bearman introduced it: “I’m not supposed to be biased, but this is my favourite session..”

Frankie’s approach is outlined in his paper, but briefly he asked the question “what if we look at the aggregate of museum collections instead of the detail?”. He got a bunch of data from several museums by submitting a Freedom Of Information request. There were some great moments: the matrix of which museums responded (most didn’t) was one of them; the final application display using Google Maps was another. But most of all he also coined the phrase “Good Enough” around museum data, which is very much aligned with my philosophy of “just do it”.

Seb showed some awesome stuff using Open Calais on museum collections at the Powerhouse and a whole load of other cool stuff around geo-rss, OpenSearch and so-on. He also came out with some great sound-bites: “look closely at order and you see mess” and “tagging: it’s a bit 2007″…

One thing that I really liked was a checkbox he had built into the CMS next to machine-generated data which asked human editors: “has a human verified this data?”. A nice touch, and presumably useful not only for checking (in an aggregate sense) how accurate the machine has been but also possible to tweak the final UI accordingly: “this data is machine generated, don’t trust it quite as much…”, or whatever.

Again, very interesting and eye-opening. Funny, too - I loved the fact that “Ray Oscilloscope” had been identified by the semantic engine as a person…it may become my new pseudonym…

Openness

On Friday, Brian and I ran a session on Openness. The people at the session were great: It was a lively and engaging debate, looking at some of the questions around openness in the museum community; how we measure value; how financial gain can be held up next to marketing exposure and so on. Seb made a great point which stayed with me about how museums have got into the habit of ascribing value to individual objects rather than to the bit which actually adds value: the context, the exhibition, the experience.

Search and semantics

Two more sessions stood out for me: first, the NMOLP presentation from the V&A in London. I have a number of concerns about the general approach this project is taking, but on the plus side they’re looking at OpenSearch to deliver cross-museum searching, and that’s (hopefully) going to be a good thing. I just hope that the Google Coop example I put up at http://www.museumcollections.org.uk/ a while back can be beaten: the point of me doing this was partly to illustrate the ease with which groups of museums can be added to cross-domain search. I’m worried about NMOLP developing their own search ranking protocol, for example, when there’s a pretty good one out there in the shape of PageRank and the Google Enterprise. I’m sure they know what they’re doing, and look forward very much to the end result. Let’s hope it’s got a public API

Nate did a rather better post on this session over here with some interesting comments, too.

The final one I’m going to post about here is a session on the Delphi Toolkit which was great because it illustrated with real world examples what these kinds of emerging semantic technologies do for the end-user. And I think the SW is an area badly lacking in examples.

Closing Plenary

The whole conference closed with what I thought was a very disappointing plenary from Clifford Lynch. Obviously only a personal opinion, but I felt that after a hugely positive, buzzing and engaging week, this was a very slow, low-energy and - most importantly - misrepresentative wrap-up to what had gone on. (I also felt at several points that he was just plain wrong about some of the stuff he talked about…)

Here’s my “direction of travel” gut feel for what actually went on during the week:

• We’re doing some very cool stuff using some great new approaches and technologies.
• We’re starting to see the benefits of open access to our content, both in terms of Creative Commons and programmatic access via API’s or syndication.
• We’re - at last - worrying less and doing more.
• We’re beginning to see the benefits of community, not just the coolness.
• Finally: we’re up for collaborating and sharing in more open and positive ways than ever before.

So that’s that. Now I’m in an airport, heading homeward. Bye for now…

12th April 2008 was the Electronic Museum’s 1st birthday. All together now, hip-hip…etc.

I started blogging at the beginning of the Museums and the Web conference on April 12th 2007. Even then I was seriously late into the game: many other bloggers have been posting since 2000 or even earlier. I’d held off for 3 main reasons:

First, if you haven’t blogged then you don’t understand the drug that it is. I started never really intending to continue, but sucked the smoke deep and never looked back.

Second, I genuinely felt (and still feel!) that there are issues within the tech and museum sectors that need attention: in other words, I have something to say. Hopefully you agree…

Finally, I spent at least a year being put off by the technology. Like many first bloggers I began with Blogger.com. Back then (and I haven’t looked recently), it was a clumsy tool; basic functionality (actually, I have to say, blocking technology), bad templates, etc. I dabbled with TypePad (ouch, unless you’ve got a degree in CompSci) and then finally settled on WordPress. It is a genius bit of user-centredness and like many great bits of tech, actually encourages you to step in and use it.

In case you’re interested and are a bit of a stat-head: just the other day I passed the 20,000 views mark; I have written 135 posts which have gathered 307 comments. Scarily, I’ve had more rogue comments caught by Akismet than visits: currently 22,263.

So. Just remains for me to say thank you for reading and commenting. Please keep doing so, and feel free to let me know whether there’s stuff you’d like me to focus on (or not focus on). It’ll be interesting to see what the coming year brings

(Thanks to diongillard for the image)

Aaron Cope from Flickr gave a good talk this morning entitled “The API As Curator” which meandered its way around but contained some gem quotes and ideas:

“once upon a time I was a painter, and then the web happened”

“you do art to share it”

“the web: it seemed a perfect way around the gallery system, which as an artist is the bane of your life”

“I come in peace”

“making the web’s plumbing non-scary”

“if you’re talking about the web then sooner or later you have to talk about computer programming”

and my favourite one of all:

“An API is the nubby bits on Lego”

He focused in general on the importance of the both the developer as permanent and valued member of any creative web team, but also the process of development itself: the iterative, always changing, rapid-cycle and how important this is to anyone trying to remain innovative and creative online.

But “nubby bits” is still the piece that stays with me

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 his talk going through a number of sites and examples, some of which will be very familiar to us web types; others a little less well known. The examples which particularly jumped out for me (for two different reasons) were the Facebook group Fair Copyright for Canada which was started by Michael, and his example of opening up the book “In the Public Interest” for free download.

The Facebook group example was particularly powerful because it caused demonstrable change in the real world. This was actually a running thread through many of the sites that Michael showed: virtual experiences are one thing, but “real” world responses to these virtual experiences are happening too, and that’s a hugely important thing to focus on. I’ve used this to defend Twitter recently (yes, I know the irony, having said bad things about lifestreaming before…) - Twitter has recently got me back in touch with people out here in the real world, and that gives it a legitimacy and power that it doesn’t necessarily have “just” online.

The “In the Public Interest” example demonstrated (although Michael didn’t give any actual figures) that free download actually increased sales. I like this because it continues to support the Scarcity vs Scale argument which I’ve pitched on this blog previously. It’s a very pertinent discussion; Brian and I are giving a paper on Openness on Friday at which we’ll be focusing on open content (among other things). Already this week - and in my experience, always within the sector - this discussion rumbles alongside most things we try to do on the web: API provision, Web 2.0, UGC or getting collections databases online. The more evidence there is that this approach works (or not!), the better.

The overriding message from Michael for me is that online activity causes, extends, pushes “real” activity in very valuable and increasingly tangible ways.

So here I am in Montreal for Museums and the Web 2008. The journey was ok apart from the obligatory 2 hour delay out of Heathrow. Someone apparently spotted a snowflake on the runway so everything ground to a halt while they dispatched the emergency extreme weather squad to sort it out.

They know how to do weather over here. It’s obviously not snowed for a while but there are still remnant piles, 6-7 feet thick just knocking around the town. Show that to anyone in the UK and the transport infrastructure would have fallen apart in seconds.

So - this week at Museums and the Web: Today - pre conference Semantic Web workshop. Wednesday, I’m running a blogging workshop with Brian Kelly in which I’ll be talking about this blog: why I do it, how it’s going, what I’ve learnt. The afternoon is my workshop on mashups. Slides and stuff for all the above coming shortly.

Then Thursday the conference sessions start. Friday and I’m back in front of people with Brian for our paper ‘what does openness mean to museums?’.

Meanwhile, I’ve provided Jennifer and David with OneTag for the week - the aim in a nutshell is to try and capture the ‘buzz’ around the conference by aggregating any blog posts and tweets tagged ‘mw2008′ and do stuff with this content. J + D have found a bunch of willing volunteers to blog alongside the people like me who’d be doing it anyway. Basically, everyone is being encouraged to tag and post as much as possible.

Have a look at:

• feed for everything tagged “mw2008”, at http://onetag.org/ot/feeds/mw2008/all_mw2008.rss
• mobile version, at http://onetag.org/ot/mobile
• slideshow for live display on a plasma screen here: http://www.onetag.org/ot/display/slideshow1/fullscreen.htm

More later.