Blogs

Although yesterday was chock full of workshops and welcomes, the MW2008 Conference official kicked off this morning with Michael Geist as the Plenary Speaker. Geist, from the University of Ottawa, Canada, describes himself as a Law Professor and “trouble-maker.”

His thesis is that we need to have an engaged and active Hands On the Internet Policy.

He began with a look back at the web in 1997, and some of the prevailing ideas of that time:

government and policy needed to stay away from the web,

and

leave it to the industry and community that could self regulate as they go along,

but the truth is that this was a myth.

the feed for the big screens is coming from

http://onetag.org/ot/display/slideshow1/fullscreen.htm

Here are some links to things we mentioned in the workshop today:

I'm at MW2008 conference in Montreal, and I’ve just been sitting in a great workshop on blogging run by Brian Kelly & Mike Ellis.

Its exciting to see the diversity of people in the session – coming from North America, Europe and New Zealand, and yet the similarity of needs and goals...

Session highlights:

Challenges to blogs: How do we...

I've just arrived at the Delta hotel in Montreal. It must be close to 25 years since I was here before.... as part of a music festival - sang with the Harmonic Choir on a barge or maybe it was a little island.  The Harmonic choir was (is) a group of 5-6 singers singing multiphonics - overtones...

  It's great to be back and I'm really looking forward to the conference.  After attending or helping to run something like 15 orchestra conferences, it will be so interesting to make a foray into the museum world. 

I'm particularly interested in how cultural groups use the web and social media, so its going to be a busy time.  Now to pour over the schedule. 

Just 24 hours to go before heading out of freezing London and jetting to the beautiful tropical beaches of Montreal. Having survived the post-Easter "ooh it wasn't meant to snow at this time of year" blizzard and the anti-Olympics protest police van traffic snarlups, all I need to do is find a plane that's actually operating from our Proud to be British, state-of-the-art, "we told you it would work better if we didn't let any passengers in" Terminal 5 Heathrow. If not, have a lovely conference and I'll see y'all next year ... !

There was quite a timely piece in C|net today about backchannels at tech-related conferences. See "How to survive the next-gen confab . It comes at a time when we're close to wrapping together a set of on-line venues for MW2008.

This will be the third year we've had an on-line space for MW while it was taking place, and afterwards. it seems that this might be the year that it takes off a bit more. If you're out and about on the Web, check out the following

So I've done some work on figuring out what's the best way to keep in touch while I'm in Montreal. I'm attaching my research below, and feel free to add comments to this post about your own carriers.

So one of the places I always check out before I go on a trip is the discussion boards at Chow.com. Not only do people post reviews and questions, but the discussions that often pop up are really insightful and help round out your perception of a place.

http://www.chowhound.com/boards/22

I've just updated the Local Information Page for Museums and the Web 2008 to include an embedded interactive map from Schmap.

I first heard about this site when they asked to use some of my flickr pictures, first for the San Francisco and later for the Montreal guides. I felt a bit ambivalent about the terms of their offered license, but decided the only way to see what was what with this kind of use was to follow the advice of Gail and Shelley and just participate.

It's interesting to see how this kind of aggregation gives you a different view than the traditional travel guide, where illustrations are much more rationed.

What do people think? is it worth keeping on the local info page? is this mashed together melange of user photos and reviews the future of travel info?

[from electronicmuseum]

I’ve put together an idea for people who run conferences or events. It’s called OneTag (www.onetag.org). It’s very simple conceptually, although as I’m discovering, a complete *dog* to code… - the idea is that it aggregates all the “buzz” about a particular (live) event and then provides the means to view this in different ways. Find out more at http://www.onetag.org/ot/about.asp.

Usual “it’s a beta” disclaimers apply…

I’m at a conference hosted by the Taiwan eLearning & Digital Archives Program (http://www.digitalarchives.tw). I’m not going to blog every session (program here) but here are some highlights from the first morning's sessions.

There's an article in the Museums Section of the New York Times yesterday about museums activities in social network spaces. it was my conversation with Dan Frost (the frelance reporter who wrote the piece) that sparked my recent blog postings about the subject. Dan's piece is a good intro ... and there are a lot of Museums and the Web papers about the subject this year, and in past years [search the bibliography].

Killer Statue — Psyched About the Site!

This hasn't been noted here, so i thought i'd pass on this bit of slightly late news [i've got my nose in the Museums and the Web proceedings production...]

The Science Museum, London, has won both Best Game and Best of Show at SXSW for its game Launchball http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/launchpad/launchball/

See http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/web_awards/winners/ for the other winners

and see Mike Ellis's blog posting about the development http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/launchball-we-did-it-differently-and-got-it-right/

Way to Go, Guys!