Some time ago, Jacco Ouwerkerk contacted me having seen the interview I did with the Museum of London. He directed me towards a hugely exciting Augmented Reality application called UAR – “Urban Augmented Reality” which launched in the Netherlands in June 2010. Here’s what we talked about. Q: Please introduce yourself, and tell us about… [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…]
This might seem like an odd question, especially given the vast (vast) quantity of effort that goes into digitisation, rights checking, caption authoring and so on. But I’m also a fan of taking a step back at least every so often and asking odd, obvious and possibly stupid questions. The question is in part prompted by… [Read more…]
Streetmuseum – a rather lovely iPhone app by the Museum of London – launched a few weeks ago, and almost immediately began to cause a bit of a buzz across Twitter and other social networks. It’s hardly surprising that people have responded so positively to it – the app takes the simplicity of the Looking Into the… [Read more…]
Shortly the Times will begin its Great Paywall Experiment, locking out all but paid (£1 a day, £2 a week) subscribers. It is very easy to laugh at Murdoch for taking this approach, but actually it’s a pretty good thing that someone has the balls/stupidity/temerity/whatever to do it. Many people – me included – have… [Read more…]
It is against an increasingly bitter backdrop of argument between Apple and Adobe (Flash! No Flash! HTML 5! Openness! Closedness! etc…) that I found myself a week ago with a damaged iPhone. An accidental dropping incident from Son1 added a seemingly minor dent just next to the power button, and hey presto – a device… [Read more…]
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: The one-liner for those that don’t have the time to go through the slides is something like this: I believe… [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…]
August 20, 2010
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