The full programme for the Museums and the Web 2009 conference was announced earlier this week. This means I can announce that as well as running a workshop on interaction design, I will also be presenting a paper at the conference on museums and wikis. I’m co-writing and co-presenting the paper with Rhiannon Loosely, who [...]
A couple of months ago I posted a blog about museums and wikis, where I mentioned that we were considering launching a wiki at the Science Museum to gather information and memories about some of the objects in our collection. Well I’m pleased to say that the project got green-lit, and I managed to a [...]
I spent Thursday evening at a smallish venue in the London Trocadero, discussing ‘Web 2.0′ with a bunch of museum people. The title of the event – ‘Wine, Web 2.0 and What’s New’ – was fairly vague, and so the discussion wandered across a few different topics, including the use of social sites like Flickr [...]
A suggestion has come up at work (The Science Museum) to do some kind of wiki for museum objects, to coincide with an upcoming exhibition. So I’ve been starting to think about what form this might take. I’ve had a fair bit of experience with wikis, from being a participant in Wikipedia and Wikinews, and [...]
Was impressed enough the The Independent’s front page today to go and find about more about The POWER inquiry report that they covering. With a title of “Power to the People”, and promises that it was from an independent inquiry after having collected a huge amount of evidence, it had to be interesting. The Independent’s [...]
MediaWiki seems to have become the de facto wiki software of choice for projects running wiki websites, and for good reason. Using the software that is behind the wikimedia sites, which include Wikipedia, the largest and most successful wiki site there is, makes good sense, as you know that the software is both being actively [...]
Spent a bit of time over the weekend looking at Wikinews, the wiki based news source from the same Foundation as Wikipedia. Wikipedia works because it’s an encyclopedia, and therefore a repository for all knowledge about everything, which means it’s very easy for people to contribute because you just think ‘what do I know about?’ [...]
An official Google Blog entry details how one user used the search engine, from their mobile, to find out information about their premature baby’s condition, with the resulting info saving the baby from an unneccesary blood transfusion. That’s all well and great, but I can’t help but think that using the internet for medical advice [...]
Over the last week, the Student Radio Association, which I’m now chair of, has set up a Student Radio Wiki. It wasn’t my initial idea and thankfully I didn’t have to install it, but it’s already working great and should turn into a valuable resource for student radio stations. One question which has already been [...]
Just stumbled across this linguistics Wikibook. Wikibooks is a project by the Wikimedia Foundation to create whole textbooks and manuals. It all seems to be in early stages at the moment, and the question will be whether enough people are willing to put the time in to contribute, but I think it’s a good idea.