If you’re interested you can find out more over on http://mobilemuseum.org.uk/ where there’s a link to a signup form. Expected launch date – end September 2011.

QR is a great technology. Actually, no – it’s an ok-ish technology. The more important thing is that the awareness means gains in popularity, which in turn means more people will know what a QR code is, how to use it – and also make them aware of some of the foibles. As with anything, this isn’t about how awesome the technology is. Many, many geeky people will tell you QR is crap – which in some ways it is per se – but the important thing is market penetration, expectation, device support – and (most importantly), the content experiences which underly it.

Underlying the concept of QR though is something rather more important, which I think many people miss in their rush to play with the latest and greatest thing. The important thing is this: QR is a way of poking the digital world into the real world. In a way, QR is simply one technology in a line of technologies that does this. Remember the first time you saw a URL on a piece of print advertising? That was digital poking into real, albeit in a slightly crap way. Then bluetooth. Now QR.

Ultimately, the concept is the same in each of these cases: put a marker in the real world which allows your audiences to connect with content in the virtual world.

The technology with which you do this can be agnostic. This year it might be QR. Next it might be NFC or AR. The following – who knows, image recognition / hyper-accurate GPS / whatever. The facts remain the same:

First: People have to have a desire to engage with the marker in the first place. Why would you go to the effort of scanning a QR code with no knowledge of what that code might provide for you? Nina Simon just recently blogged about QR Codes and Visitor Motivation which asks this question. The cost curve - as always – has to balance: the value that your user gets out must be greater than the effort that they have to put in – and (almost more important), you have to make this value clear before they scan.

Second: A proportion of people will never take part / have the technology to take part. QR scanning (or – even more so – NFC or whatever the next big thing is) will be a niche activity for the foreseeable future. Bear in mind that not only does your user have to have a QR code reader installed, they also need the right kind of phone, an internet connection at the point of scan AND a contract with their provider that lets them use this connection. These things are becoming more real, but it is by no means a given yet.

Third – and possibly the most important – the content that you deliver should add something significant to their experience. This is tied to the first point. Here’s a banner I snapped when I was in London recently:

If you scan this you get a link to the UCL Zoology Museum (and ironically, out of shot to the left is the URL that the QR code sends you to..). From a user experience perspective, I bet you 50p I can get my smartphone out, type in the url and be looking at the relevant content quicker than you can boot up a QR app, scan and open.

In this instance, you do actually end up at a mobile-friendly site and some interesting links to QR technologies in use at UCL – which is fantastic. But the use case and motivation aren’t really articulated in the physical world.

Finally – you can easily put some measures in place to track usage, and use this to inform future activity. Here’s another example, this time from the British Library:

If you follow this link, you’ll find it goes to http://www.bl.uk/sciencefiction. The problem with this is that the URL is the same one as is being used on the poster, around the web and in all their other marketing. So when it comes to evaluating the use of QR – and whether it has been successful as a means to pull in new visitors – my suspicion is the BL won’t have any idea how to separate out these clicks from any of the others.

The simple solution to this is to use something like bit.ly and create a unique URL which is specifically for this QR code. More advanced techniques might include things like appending a string to the end of the URL (for example www.bl.uk/sciencefiction?source=qr) – or using Google Analytics “campaigns” to track these.

(Note that you could also get even more clever by having separate unique QR codes for separate advertising zones or even for separate posters – imagine the impact of being able to track which posters or areas have been most successful…now that’s cool use of a technology…)

Coming back to the beginning of this post – the overriding point here is that QR, and many other technologies similar to it, provide a very exciting way of bringing digital content into the real world. With some upfront thinking, genuinely interesting content can be delivered in this way and users can be made to engage. As ever, though, it isn’t about the technology but about the use, motiviation and content which lies behind the technology. These are the things that count.

I caught up with Vicky Lee last week and asked her a bunch of questions about the app. Here’s what she had to say:

Q: Please introduce yourself, and tell us about your involvement with the Museum of London iPhone app project

I’m Vicky Lee, Marketing Manager for the Museum of London. As part of the launch campaign for the new Galleries of Modern London I’ve been working with creative agency Brothers and Sisters to develop a free iPhone app – Streetmuseum – that brings the Museum to the streets.

Q: Tell us about the app – what it does, and how you’re hoping people will use it, also about how successful it is being

Streetmuseum uses augmented reality to give you a unique perspective of old and new London. The app guides users to sites across London where over 200 images of the capital, from the Museum of London’s art and photographic collections, can be viewed in-situ, essentially offering you a window through time. If you have a 3GS iPhone these images can be viewed in 2D and also in 3D, as a ghostly overlay on the present day scene. The AR function cannot be offered on 3G iPhones but users can still track the images through their GPS and view them in 2D, with the ability to zoom in and see detail. To engage with as many Londoners as possible, images cover almost all London boroughs. Each image also comes with a little information about the scene to give the user some historical context.

What we bet on from the start was that users would enjoy finding images of the street they live or work on and would be quick to demonstrate this to their friends and colleagues – helping to spread the word about Streetmuseum but also raising the profile of the Museum itself, particularly among young Londoners who we have previously struggled to reach. We hoped that the app would spread virally in this way within days and it certainly seems to have worked as in just over 2 weeks the app has had over 50,000 downloads. It’s just been released in all international iTunes stores so we’re expecting this figure to rocket over the coming weeks.

Q: Why did you choose to build an iPhone app as opposed to something else (Android, web, etc)

When I wrote the brief for a viral campaign to promote the new galleries and reposition the Museum of London, I had no idea we would end up launching an app. I hadn’t for one moment considered that we could afford to develop an app but Brothers and Sisters’ instinct from the start was that this was what we needed to change perceptions about the Museum. As soon as we understood how the concept fitted in with the overall marketing campaign (which also uses images from the Museum’s collections) it was the only option we wanted to pursue.
As with most Museum projects we were limited by budget so it was a case of either iPhone or Android but not both. To launch with maximum impact our feeling was that we had to go out with an iPhone app, therefore benefiting from the positive associations with the Apple brand and securing the interest of the media. We hope now to be able to secure funding to develop an Android version of the app in response to the many requests we have received.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the financial model? Did you build it in partnership with someone else?

As a free museum reliant on funding, we would not have been able to create this app without collaborating with Brothers and Sisters. The partnership was mutually beneficial, generating media coverage for both parties and new business leads for the agency. Using images from the Museum’s collections meant that all the content was readily available so this kept costs down. Licensing agreements on certain images made it complicated to charge for the app, however it was always our intention to launch this free in order to reach the widest possible audience.

Q: Overall, what have you learnt about the process so far?

Simple works best. We originally planned to include user generated content but dropped this idea to ensure we stuck to our budget and timescale. Ultimately the idea is not that original but its simplicity has made the app an easy sell, both nationally and internationally.
I’d certainly give myself more time in future – we delivered the app in an incredibly short amount of time which gave little opportunity to review how it worked in practice. With more time we could have carried out user testing and refined the concept further to end up with an even slicker product.

Q: What else have you got planned for mobile at the MOL into the future?

We’re keen to keep the momentum going and stay ahead of the field, so, together with Brothers and Sisters, we are already looking at how we can develop this concept further. If we can secure additional funding we’d like to explore different subject areas and tie-in with future exhibitions and gallery redevelopments. Most importantly though we need to build upon what we have already achieved and keep evolving to ensure that any new apps continue to be newsworthy. We are also looking into the possibility of adding more images to the current Streetmuseum app and developing a version for Android phones.

The poor, bashed-about phone I dropped was a Gen 1 iPhone: almost a retro device by some accounts. Nonetheless, I’ve stuck with it, and life now without an internet-ready mobile is simply not an option for me. It was therefore a rather lucky twist of fate that found a generous friend offering me his brand new Android phone to use for a while.

So I find myself with the latest and greatest Android handset: an HTC Desire. A ten zigabit processor, a gwillion megapixel camera, a ten billion pixel screen, infinite memory. Something like that, anyway. It’s slick, beautiful, thin, light. It has a bright, hi-res screen, a wonderful camera. It is rammed to the hilt with functionality. I’m blown away by having real location capability (remember, my Gen 1 could only find me using cell stuff rather than GPS); I’ve experienced using Layar, Google Sky Maps, other LBS services – properly – for the first time. That openness, that speed, that power. Awesome.

The first night I got back with the Desire, I found myself sitting on the sofa, flicking my way through the Android store, checking Twidroid, browsing the news. And a weird thing happened, something I wasn’t expecting. Like an almost intangible movement in my peripheral vision, I realised that something wasn’t quite right. I was a bit on edge, trying a bit hard, having to think. Night One, I said to myself. Night One with a new and unfamiliar device. No wonder. It’ll be ok tomorrow.

The thing is: the uneasy thought didn’t get better the next day, or the next night, or the night after that.

After a week of using the latest and greatest Android phone, I find myself sitting down on the sofa in the evening and the thing is sitting unused on the top of the piano. Instead I’m – get this - back using the 1st generation iPhone. It’s SIM-less (useless as a phone, but still ok as a device on the WIFI), battered, slow as buggery, and I can’t turn it off, but hey – I’m back.

Now’s the point in time I should make something very clear: I’m not an Apple fanboy. I have a Macbook at home but I spend most of my working life on PC’s. In my past I’ve used both, enjoyed both, had different experiences of both. I’m also pretty conflicted about some of the recent moves by Apple. I personally think that the whole anti-Flash thing is a major mistake, in the same way that I think the anti-Flash zealots are making some pretty bold assumptions in saying that HTML5 can replace Flash at this point in time. Frankly, that’s bullshit. I also dislike the pro-app, anti-web thing that they appear to have going on. The web wins: it always will. Apple say they get this but do a bunch of stuff which implies otherwise.

I wanted to love Android. I wanted to embrace openness, turn my back on Apple’s rejection of free markets, join the crowd of developers shouting about this new paradigm.

I can’t.

I’ve tried very hard to articulate to myself why this is the case. It is – certainly – something about usability. To take one of many examples: on Android you apparently have one paradigm for copy and paste in one application, and another in another: in the browser you get a reasonable Apple-like magnifier; in Twidroid (for example), you don’t. This to me just simply isn’t acceptable. Copy and paste is ubiquitous, end of. Stuff like global Google Search is good – very good – but when every move is hampered by subtle but vital compromises in usability, the overall experience becomes stressful, not playful.

The Android store is also, frankly, embarrassing. I tried very hard to find any kind of game or app that came close to the beautiful stuff you see on even the worst of the Apple store. Nothing. The UI of many apps is just terrible, the graphics all a bit 1995. Crashes are frequent, and when they do happen they are peppered with developer-like comments about code and runtimes.

It’s hard – store aside – to fault the Android device from a functionality perspective, and I’ve tried very hard to find ways that I can articulate what exactly is wrong. It is something about playfulness, about the fun of the technology. There is also something about quality. Robert Pirsig says this:

“…the result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable…”

I don’t want to get all metaphysical about Apple products: enough people do this already, but the iPhone experience – in a week of living with Android – is much, much closer to the invisible technology that makes for a better and more natural user experience. That’s what has me reaching for an old, broken, semi-retired phone rather than the faster, slicker, by-all-accounts-better model.

Apple stuff comes with a compromise – and make no mistake, I’m as conflicted as the rest of the world about this: the restricted UI, the closed and editorially controlled store, the limits placed by Apple on the devices their OS will run on – these are not “good” things – but they appear, at least in this instance, to be necessary for quality. When Android is forking its way off into infinite loops of differentness, each with pluses and minuses, Apple stays the course – a slow, chugging, proprietary, known experience. It doesn’t feel right, and yet it absolutely does.

When I think about what this means, I worry. As technology people, we should all be concerned about the approaches that Facebook, Google and Apple are taking, and we all know that openness is – or should be – key. But – and I’ve written about this a bit before – usability and ubiquity are the definers for normal, non-geeky people, not openness or functionality. And we need to focus on this and think about what it means when usability comes into conflict with openness, as I believe it does with Android.

So that’s me. I tried. Circumstance mean I’ll be using Android for the next few weeks either way, and I may change my mind. I may find myself on the sofa using the Ferrari of phones rather than the Morris Minor. But somehow, I doubt it.

The one-liner for those that don’t have the time to go through the slides is something like this: I believe that although mobile has been held up as THE NEXT BIG THING for some time, we are reaching a kind of “perfect storm” of conditions where it is at last becoming a viable reality for many users and therefore something for institutions to think about, too.

This is as much to do with effective marketing and consciousness raising as it is to do with device or network capability: if you’ve tried buying a mobile phone in the last year or two, you will have been offered mobile internet; if you go to a mobile phone company website today, you’ll see smartphones, dongles and internet on the go on their homepage. It would be very hard to miss this kind of marketing push. Couple this with the radical improvement of mobile content, the beginnings of location-based services and the increasing speeds and capability of a “normal” mobile device, and it seems pretty clear that we’re on the cusp of something pretty big.

If you’re in any doubt, check out slides 25-35 of the presentation that Dan Zambonini and I did at DISH 2009, which have some interesting figures on changing mobile usage. With device replacements happening on average every 14 months, even the old-school phones that don’t support mobile internet won’t be here for much longer.

With this level of exposure, it’s obvious that museums and other cultural heritage institutions are going to be following along and getting excited about mobile, either building iPhone apps or creating mobile versions of their sites.

While it is excellent to see innovation in this field, I’m slightly underwhelmed by some of the mobile offerings starting to appear that seem to be more “because we can” rather than “because we should”, in particular the current trend (and I’m deliberately not giving any examples – you can go find them yourself!) for “mobile collections search”.

It seems to me that the single mantra which should surround any mobile web development project right from the start is something like “never forget: the mobile browsing experience is far, far inferior to the desktop browsing experience”.

Browsing a mobile website is generally not a fun time. You don’t relax when you’re browsing on a mobile; you don’t lose yourself in the content: you’re there in sit forward mode, and you want to do one of two things:

1. find some information and get out as quickly as you can
2. use the capability of the “mobile” bit of the experience to do something…well, “mobile”

The first point is a no-brainer, IMO. Consider when and how I might choose to browse a museum website on my mobile. The answer is not “in my living room at home” – if I’m there, I’ll go find my laptop and have a far easier and more pleasurable experience in sit back mode. The answer probably is (and don’t shout at me for being obvious..) but when I’m mobile. I’m out and about, wondering what to do at lunchtime, thinking about whether a museum is open or where I can get tickets or how to get there. I’m not on WIFI, and I want the information as quickly and as seamlessly as possible. I don’t want images, I don’t want interaction, I want information. And I want it right now. And – this is the painful bit – I really, really don’t want to browse the collections. Why would I want a second-rate experience of browsing content using a 2″ screen, some clumsy non-mouse interaction touchpoints and a slow connection? And – more to the point – why would I possibly want to stand in the street (being mobile…) and look at museum collections? I don’t*.

* Actually, sometimes I do, provided the mobile experience adds something. And this is where point 2 comes in:

If I can have an experience which augments my real experience rather than just providing a poor quality facsimile of an online experience - then you’re talking about truly putting mobile capability to good use.

So for example – if I’ve got a known location (and this can mean GPS but more likely in our museum context means “I’m standing in front of artefact X and my phone knows that because I’ve keyed in something to tell it this”), then now is the time for the museum to give me additional information about other similar exhibits, let me bookmark that artwork, or share it with my network.

mobile.nmsi.ac.uk - something I knocked out about 5 years ago and still live!

Some of the museum sites we’re starting to see are making use of this capability – check out BlkynMuse on your mobile (and note the immediate emphasis on “where are you on-gallery?”) as a good example; but there also seems to be an increasing number who are simply putting their museum collections online as they are in some kind of mobile format – either a mobile optimised site or (worse) an iPhone application, with none of the context-sensitivity that makes mobile a value-add proposition for end-users.

Much as I’m glad to see innovation in this space, I’d much rather see museums focussing on point 1 above by having a mobile-sniffing code on their homepage and redirecting to an optimised m.museumsite.com page with visiting information, than putting in a huge amount of effort into providing mobile-optimised collections search. At the very worst, museums should have the subdomain m.*** or mobile.*** and there have a script to strip out the images and so on. There are many ways to do this – here, for example is the Museum of London site stripped using a simple PHP script from Phonefier, or see these tips on how to create simple “mobilised” versions of your existing site with zero extra effort.

Once the simple and high-gain win is done, then it’d be great to see some location-specific and innovative approaches to “virtually collecting” or augmenting collections experiences. But the “browse our mobile collections site” without really thinking about the use-case is pretty much saying: “go here on your mobile and you can have an experience which is infinitely worse than the one on your desktop with absolutely no upside”. In other words, no thanks.

What do you think? Has your museum got a mobile site for visitors, or just for collections, or none at all? What mobile apps have you downloaded or accessed that provide museum collections (or other) information? How was it for you?

UPDATE (about 3 minutes after I posted this…): I just realised I utterly neglected to talk about gaming. Which, IMO, is where mobile (and in particular mobile collections) have a huge amount of potential. I think this’ll have to wait for a future post

Tim (my mate Tim. Ha ha. If I didn’t like what he had to say I’d call him “O’Reilly”..) mentions what looks like a great book called Augumented Reality: A Practical Guide. He goes on to post about the overlaying of the web on the real world and vice versa. This is exactly where the ubiquitousness of mobile devices is likely to take us, IMHO.

On what I thought was a similar vein, I got really excited this morning when I first saw myvu and figured (before I’d seen the really boring video) that it was going to be a kind of “personal HUD“. In fact, it’s “just” a pair of glasses with a TV in them (notice how I belittle what is obviously an enormous step in technology, one that would have made Bond weep with joy only 5 years ago..).

The overlaying of virtual on real is one of my major excitement factors for where the web goes from here. As soon as you start getting stuff like Google Earth and more importantly Keyhole (now Google Earth Community) and Sketchup integration – UGC style – with that environment, the augmentation starts to gather weight as being not only exciting but useful too.

The obvious missing links are tantalisingly solveable, too. With “out and about” computing, the always-on data plan is fixing the “device is cleverer than network” issue. The remaining link – “where, exactly am I?” is nearly fit for purpose but not quite fit for purpose enough. GPS (if you have it) gets you accurate location, but as Tim says – not internally, not per floor of building, not centimetre accurate. There is of course cell location (accuracy maybe 300 m in urban locations, and available on any phone) but that isn’t cutting it, either.

I also posted about how a future where images could be knitted together and then used to create wireframed 3D environments on a map. Now chuck in the augmentation element – real time data overlaid on known location – and stuff suddenly gets very Minority Report indeed.

Check out megaphone for a very cool, completely addictive and (probably) easy to implement idea: using your phone as a controller for enormous video screens. It’s collaborative gameplay just like those Saturday morning TV shows we used to watch (“down a little bit…SHOOT!”) only a whole bundle better. As the makers point out, it’s unprecedented in scale and can be played across multiple locations.

I’m guessing it uses phone tones as the controlling method: advantage – no installs, no specialist phones, no limits on network.

First one to implement it in a museum context wins 50p…

I move on, as anyone does from a job they’ve lived and loved for that length of time, with a huge range of emotions. I’m terribly sad to no longer be attached to an institution with such vast public kudos. I’ll miss the people hugely – I’ve never worked with such an interesting, creative and open-minded bunch before. I’ll probably never work on such a huge range and variety of projects. But it’s time to go, and I’m delighted and excited about the future I’ve got coming up in Bath.

As part of this post, I thought I’d jot down three or four of the key developments in the history of NMSI online since August 2000 – mainly this is indulgence, but I thought it might also cast some light on how and why things changed over the years. Personally, I’ve learnt hugely important things about the web, people, the complex set of politics which exist in any institution of this size and scope, not to mention museums online and the vast range of technologies available to us.

This is, by the way, an entirely non-exhaustive history. One day I’ll get round to charting everything out, but today is not that day

I first started at the Science Museum back in August 2000. I’d left Waterstone’s online at that point in any job when you start twitching: It was hugely hard work, but I wasn’t learning anything new. At the time, I was massively excited by the opportunity of working at the best museum in London (sorry, but it’s true..), but also arrogant enough – the dotcom boom providing 2 or 3 job offers each week – to negotiate quite hard with the museum prior to an offer. I told them I wasn’t going to come along unless they increased the pittance of operational budget which was then allocated to web, and also find some additional people to help make it happen. They agreed.

The first few months were terrifying, but exhilarating. There was a lot of blagging on my part: at the time I knew nothing whatsoever about how to put together an agenda or chair a meeting. I’d never managed a budget (having just negotiated a bigger one, this was particularly daunting…). I had a server to look after (and knew nothing about server-side technology). I couldn’t code. I had a vision, but no people who could help me do it. The museum had just reached an impasse with an agency who will remain nameless who had built them an interestingly exotic(!) “CMS”. The site had just been re-designed but loads of snagging issues remained from the old site (wait for images to load for full effect!).

I muddled through. I bought books on ASP. I junked the CMS system the agency had built and installed my own homebuilt version (not particularly popular, that move, given what had been spent…). I patched up the server as it memory-leaked and limped its way from day to day. I did frightening things like find and replace the file extensions on the entire site to convert it to .asp…(and yes, I backed up first…)

Shortly after that, I persuaded Daniel Evans to come to the museum from Waterstone’s Online. He proved an incredible asset. Just after that, the dotcom boom crashed into the world of online bookselling and the 60-strong staff at W/O was “consolidated” into 3 or 4. We felt good having escaped.

Rolling out the CPS, or Content Publishing System – a simple VBScript application which let users around the museum edit their own content – was the first major milestone for us. It marked the point at which we seriously began handing ownership of the content to the organisation. At last, people started to appreciate why they should own and change their stuff. At the same time the system largely side-stepped the “resource bottleneck” which so often exists in web teams, but also left publishing control with the web team. We tried hard not to edit too much, and it also gave us a chance to prevent Comic Sans showing its horrible face on our site…

At around this time, I started working with Ann Borda (now at JISC) to develop a concept for what would later become Ingenious. It started life as “Science & Culture”. It’s interesting to note, given the vast remit (the first cross-NMSI project) and the huge timescale (over 3 years), that the very first sketches we presented were pretty much what we finally delivered in June 2004. This was the first lesson for me, and the first real resistance I developed to that all-pervasive museum treacle: projects are better done over short bursts, with small groups of stakeholders who are capable of moving fast and deciding quickly. It took huge energy (which to everyone’s credit, they retained over 3 long years) and quantities of strong coffee to make the site happen. Although it has very obvious shortfallings (second lesson: less really is more…), I’m still proud of what we achieved.

Making the Modern World Online followed soon afterwards. For the most part, this project ran outside the web team, but we had input on accessibility and design, and helped steer it (mostly) in a strategic direction which roughly followed what we wanted to achieve for the museum online. During this time, we worked hard on developing web policies and strategies to support us in everything we did. The key lesson we learnt here (it looks obvious now, but it was a revelation at the time..) was to align – 100% – all our strategic thinking with the goals of the organisation, literally drawing lines between what the wider business wanted to achieve and what web could do to support those goals. We coupled this with incredibly close work with the Visitor Research team. Third lesson: end users are the best friends you can possibly have, and will provide you with endless ammunitation to throw at the internal politics..

Next up was continued development of Sciencemuseumstore and then the launch of the Dana Centre. The original website for this was put together out of a small budget and little time, and this time we pushed forwards with more efficiency – although a small project we did it quickly with just a sidewards glance at the politics. The site was later re-built and relaunched by Frankie Roberto, the museums second Web Developer, and by gum it looks and works a whole lot better than it did the first time around…

Meanwhile, Daniel and Joe Cutting had started working on a vision for Antenna, our rapidly changing science news section. Initially, I have to be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure what exactly they were banging on about: XML and XSLT were new and mysterious things to me, and I couldn’t really see how they would help (cue sheepish grin..). Luckily they just got on with it rather than trying to explain it to me, and ended up writing a content system which revolutionised the way that the Antenna team edit and publish content. In brief, the system allows creation of a single XML-based content source which is then re-purposed to both web and gallery kiosks. Dan did some tests at some point and found that entire gallery stories could be built and published in around 12 minutes, a huge resource saving to the 2-3 days it was taking prior to that. The system is still in place today, and was really the pre-cursor to our understanding of how a good CMS system should capitalise on XML to deliver content to multiple channels. A similar approach was used by the agency who developed the fabulous Energy website, and continues to be the end-goal for Content Management at NMSI today: one “pot” of content delivering to gallery, web, mobile and anywhere else we choose…

Meanwhile, we were working hard on the Science Museum website, consolidating content, tidying up bad code, trying to CSS the whole thing. Behind the scenes, I was rallying for budget to re-develop it. Note “re-develop” rather than “re-design”: we knew we wanted to do something radical with the entire thing rather than just re-skin it: this is what we’d done in 2000 and apart from making it look better, it had still remained badly broken under the hood.

Eventually we got budget. The entire re-development project probably took about 3 years – again, far too long – but we remained incredibly enthusiastic with the vision we put together and the agencies we took on to do the work. The energy remained pretty high, which is always the most important thing. The new site went live on 26th March 2007. Beautiful, isn’t it?

At the same time (and looking back I can really see that we took on far too much in one go..) I was also working on putting together a vision for Content Management at NMSI. After a long procurement process we bought Sitecore, a fabulously powerful, standards-compliant .NET system. The ultimate, organisation-wide vision of building in Enterprise Content Management to everything content-related is still in its infancy at NMSI, but Web CM is the first, very visible starting point on that journey.

Of course we also continued to build in user generated content and new technologies wherever we could. Our web strategy took the organisational direction and applied UGC, drawing parallels between what our stakeholders wanted and what the web can usefully deliver. This ranged from SMS messaging during risqué Dana debates, encouraging visitors to bring in toys, a range of RSS feeds, allowing users to Ask Glenn – to mention but a few…

Next?

I have no doubts at all that web will continue to grow in importance and stature at NMSI. The vision, the environment, the beginnings I’ve had the privilege to be involved in – all point to an incredibly interesting future. I’ll be watching (with only occasional twinges of regret..) and undoubtedly blogging about it too.

The next huge thing on the immediate radar is the launch of Launchpad, the flagship hands-on gallery at the museum which is due to re-open – much bigger and improved – later in the year. I’ll be posting very, very soon about the online element of this. I’ve had the privilege of helping develop the concept for this and have watched it grow into something absolutely outstanding. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen for some time. But you’ll have to wait a little while before you too get to see it…

Stufflinker lets you save thoughts, urls and other, er, stuff, while you’re out and about using text messages, as well as the creation of ‘stufftags’ which link through to specific content on the web.

To take part in the beta you have to be in the uk, have a mobile, and be up for some fiddling.

Please sling a comment at this post if you’re interested and I’ll get in contact.

Cheers…!

Nokia is piloting some stuff which is going to help the momentum – barcode readers are now standard on a few of their N series phones. Also Microsoft is sniffing around too. At one point there was a link to some stuff on their “Live Ideas” pages but it seems to be redundant now.

The basic idea in case you don’t know is to tag real world stuff (including, potentially, museum objects) with “2d barcodes” (see example below). Pointing your cameraphone at the code – provided it has software installed – delivers content, or takes you to a url.

Until now this has been a great idea but problematic – as per my previous post about My Art Space, the number of people likely to install software on their mobile is extremely limited. But once a telco begins taking this seriously and shipping phones with software pre-installed, stuff will definitely begin to happen.

Have a look at The Pondering Primate for a great lowdown on what’s happening in this space. There’s also a list of the Physical World Connection companies – it’s an absolutely saturated space, just waiting for a leadning standard to emerge

Here’s the Nokia barcode for www.electronicmuseum.org.uk: