Blogs

Unbundles of Joy - New York Times

Daniel Akst writes today in the New York Times about the tensions between aggregation and disaggregation in the world of Web content.

He says, "In the unbundled age, we will get a clearer look at what we - and our work - are worth in the marketplace, with some social and financial implications." If content is available at an atomic level, and payment is possible for the page, not the book (just like it is for the song, not the album) then, yes, we might get a different kind of indication of just what part of our work people value ... but what will they be missing?

Brewster Kahle spoke briefly in the Opening Plenary at the Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting  this week about the need for libraries to 'walk the walk' and apply the principles of  openness that demand from publishers to the content they are creating themselves. These were ideas he, Dan Greenstein, Jim Michalko and others followed up in a breakout session that went into more detail about the Open Content Archive. Brewster is understandably concerned about the availability of content and the artificial limitations placed on the utility networked content by an unwillingness to share -- or is that a desire to own?

... and wish her happy birthday "  ...

overheard in transit ... it made me wonder what else he delegated...

jt

At CNI:

Social Bookmarking in an Academic Environment

Michael Winkler (Director, Information Technologies & Digital Development @ University of Pennsylvania) talked about Social Bookmarking in an Academic Environment. He introduced penTags, an application they had created to support students' development of annotated bibliographies in an cinema studies course, that's since been used to create research guides for the library and image portfolios and to support other personal uses of tagging.

The Globe and Mail: Did you notice their guns?

Museum educators talk a lot about learning to see ... about the importance of visual literacy and non-verbal communication. In this article, Simon Houpt of the Globe and Mail, gives a great summary of some non-traditional uses of art museum collections to teach skills of observation and analysis.

"For almost two years now, the Frick has been running a program with the police department that brings captains into the museum for a few hours to test and hone their observational skills. It was inspired by a program for students at Yale University's medical school which has spawned a number of copycat initiatives around the United States. A study submitted by Yale faculty, and published in the September, 2001, edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, indicated that students' observational performance was significantly increased by spending a few hours looking at representational paintings."

in a talk at FIS about tacit knowledge and communication in the context of an NDLE project Mic Khoo wondered why attempts to compensate for acknowledged different perspectives didn't result in a successful project dynamic.  He posited that failures to express 'tacit knowledge' became significant barriers in communication between the Principal Investigators and the participating teachers.

It's an interesting thought ... that if you don't express all your assumptions, and if you are not conscious about what you know, and what others don't know, that you won't communicate most effectively. And it certainly rings true with my experience in inter-disciplinary collaborative projects.

Electronic SwatchBook: 4-Describe

Originally uploaded by jtrant.

Powerhouse Museum - Electronic Swatchbook

Google Base

Here's the Google beta of genre tagged blog positings... seems surprisingly inelegant. There's a Web4Lib thread on this at http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/web4lib/2005-November/039066.html

jt

one of the beauties of where i live is the closeness to the Beach ... where we walk every morning with our dog Slate. It's a great stretch of park, sand, Boardwalk and open water (our own freshwater ocean).

Today, being Sunday, we went a bit further than usual. How far? Take a look at the map on http://gmap-pedometer.com:

jt, DB and Slate: Sunday November 20, 2005

Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

Following our discussion at the Corante SSA, he says:

"I also met one of the people responsible for Steve, The Art Museum Community Cataloging Project, which could be the most important folksonomy and tagging endeavor that is ongoing. The importance is in part their work, but the research into tagging and folksonomy is insanely helpful and seems to be the best work out there at the moment. The work proves the strong positive significance that tagging and folksonomy plays in connecting people to objects and information. Having the world framed in a language or vocabulary is incredibly helpful and that is not often a result of formal taxonomies as they tend to optimize toward the norms and not embrace the edges. I will be writing about Steve more in the future, but I was so excited to meet somebody tied to the project so I could have more conversations and learn what they have found to be helpful and not so helpful."

Identity Woman » on a business panel

I had a good talk with kaliya about identity on Monday night, and find it still resonanting in my mind. There's a lot in the concept that would improve the museum web experience.

We imagine that the audience for culture is shared across many institutions. My local Museum Member is your tourist audience at the physical museum -- that's why we have reciprocal visiting agreements, where my membership is recognised @ your museum. But what about museum Web sites?

StructedBlogging.org » What is Structured Blogging?

hmm ... an attempt to improve the precision of searching by enabling authors to define the genre of a blog post.  An interesting attempt at an explicit form of content differentiation, in the aid of better clustering of content and smarter filtering.

Attending the Symposium on Social Architecture was a good experience for me. It's been a long time since I walked into a room where I didn't know anyone, and it reminded me of the responsibility that event organizers have to their participants.

At the opening plenary of Museums and the Web 2005, (I'm co-chair of this annual event) I was painfully aware that the conference was growing to a point that made it almost anti-social. I did the unthinkable for a conference organizer; I encouraged people not to go to sessions. When faced with a choice between continuing an interesting conversation in the hallway, and moving into a room to sit passively and listen, my advice was skip the session. Stay in the hall and talk to a person. You can read the papers later. Meeting people was the reason you bothered to take time out of your life and travel.

This seems rather redundant, but since the MCN-L list isn't archived anywhere, I wanted to capture this dicussion somewhere outside my email. It all began with this [i've pulled all emails]:

From: "Deborah Wythe" <>
To: mcn-l mcn.edu
Subject: subject & keyword searching in CMS and DAMS
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:12:11 -0500

I'm curious to know if your museum assigns formal subject headings and/or keywords to works of art in their collections management or digital asset management systems. A little poking around on the Web seems to indicate it's not too common -- artist name, title, medium, collection, maybe a general category, yes, but something approaching the depth of the subject headings used in library catalogs--maybe no?

'Tagging' gives Web a human meaning | CNET News.com

You have to keep going until the last page... but if you plow through the discussion of the basics of tagging, you'll find that steve has intrigued Thomas Vander Wal enough for him to mention us (though not specifically).

I talked with him yesterday about steve when we were both at a Symposium on Social Architecture ... and it looks like there's some follow-up in the cards.