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 [...]
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 [...]
The week before last (30th June – 1st July 2009), I was at the JISC Digital Content Conference having been asked to take part in one of their parallel sessions. I thought I’d use the session to talk about something I’m increasingly interested in – the shifting of the message about machine readable data (think [...]
I just finished my talk at Mashed Library 2009 – an event for librarians wanting to mash and mix their data. My talk was almost definitely a bit overwhelming, judging by the backchannel, so I thought I’d bang out a quick blog post to try and help those I managed to confuse. My talk was [...]
It’s been interesting watching the response to whatever 2.0 is as the whatever it was has matured into whatever it is now. …I should probably rephrase that… The social web has changed as it crawled its way through those painful teen years of greasy skin, piercings, “you just don’t understand me” and shouting at its [...]
The concept and importance of museum-based API’s are notions that I’ve written about consistently (boringly, probably) both on this blog and elsewhere on the web. Programmatic and open access to data is – IMO – absolutely key to ensuring the long-term success of online collections. Many conversations have been going on about how to make [...]
I’m just back from Torquay where I’d been asked to speak at the 32nd annual UKSG conference. I first came across UKSG more than a year ago when they asked me to speak at a London workshop they were hosting. Back then, I did a general overview of API’s from a non-technical perspective. This time [...]
There’s been a fair bit of buzz around the launch of the NMOLP (National Museums Online Learning Project) – now apparently renamed as “Creative Spaces” for launch. I’ve known about this project for a long while – when I was at the Science Museum, very initial discussions were taking place at the V&A about how [...]
This is just going to be a quickie, mainly so I get it out before I go away on holiday never to remember it again. At some point I might expand on it. Over the last few weeks in particular, we’ve seen the public finally sitting up and noticing Twitter. It’s been on the BBC, [...]
This blog post has been lurking as an idea in my drafts folder for a long time, waiting for me to write something about the issues of “enterprise” and “lightweight”. If you haven’t gathered it already you’re either new here or have been seriously thick skinned when I’ve ranted on about why I think IT [...]