6 Videos to Inspire Content Marketers

Videos are taking on steam in the content marketing world. According to research from KingFishMedia, 35% of corporate managers/marketers are currently using a YouTube Channel as a social media tactic, with 44% planning to do so in the next 12 months. This is the tactic with the biggest projected growth in the next 12 months. So, what makes a good video? Here are six examples to get you inspired.

The Year in Enhancing Reality

2010 saw an explosion of 3-D products for consumers and also the arrival of augmented reality as a mainstream technology. In both areas, however, only some commercial implementations proved ready for prime time.... Read more at Technology Review

The New Capitalist Manifesto

How to transform the dominant paradigm in six steps. Read more here.

Endless Innovation: The Future of Visual Storytelling

From The Last Supper to the iPad Tablet

Improving Family Exhibitions by Co-Creating with Children

For one year, a group of twelve schoolchildren age 9-11 were invited to work with staff at the Wallace Collection to develop a family-focused exhibition using the museum's artifacts. With the support of museum staff, children developed the exhibition theme, selected the objects, designed the space, developed interpretative materials (including interactives), managed the budget, raised sponsorship, created press and marketing materials, put on the opening party, led interpretative tours, and trained museum guides. The exhibition was open for 54 days and was visited by 14,000 people. You can read a full report on the exhibition process, including lots of quotes from the young curators, staff, and educators involved, here.

The Dawn of Sensors & Social Media in the World of Fine Art

Wall placards, museum docents and audio tours have all become essential technologies for many peoples' engagement with our collective culture as represented in the world's fine art. Imagine what could happen if your enjoyment of art was augmented further by the kinds of social technologies that you already use on the internet. Thousands of visitors to the STRP art festival got to experience the festival's creative integration of its existing art exhibits with Twitter, Facebook, a recommendation engine, a print-on-demand service, tag clouds and RFID chips. Read about it here.

Bridging the digital divide through eBario concept

Inspiration here for the NT?

Ten Alternative CMS Options to Wordpress

Check out some awesome alternatives to WordPress via Speckyboy Design Magazine

Crowdsourcing the Museum

Museums have long survived on the generosity of volunteers who carry out vital work to support the everyday work of the institution. This article looks at how volunteering is evolving in the digital world with interesting projects which ask the public to volunteer their time online.

Social Media Policy | National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia embraces the use of social media as a corporate communications and community-building tool. The Library encourages every employee to have an opportunity to express and communicate online in many ways, such as through social media, professional networking sites, blogs, and personal web sites. However, all employees need to use good judgment about what material appears online, and in what context.

Download the policy here.

Effective Uses of Video in the Classroom

File this under Digital Playrooms.

vj.tv

vjs, visuals, mash-ups, and more…

Broadband to the bush

CSIRO's Ngara technologies aim to bring wireless broadband Internet access to rural and regional areas of Australia. (Profile - Project)

8 Tools For Easily Creating a Mobile Version of Your Website

These tools work by detecting the user agent of your site visitors, which is just fancy talk for finding out whether a visitor is using a regular web browser or a mobile web browser. If the user agent is a mobile browser, users are redirected to your website’s mobile version. The common practice is to assign the mobile version of your site with a sub-domain as such m.yourwebsite.com. In this manner, your site traffic is forked into two segments, giving all of your site visitors an optimal browsing experience.

Public phones converted to wifi hotspots

With mobilephone ownership at near saturation point amongst the remote area indigenous population and the inevitable upgrade of these devices to smartphone capacity a phenomena of the near future, me thinks it will be sooner rather than later before Telstra converts their payphones into wifi hotspots.

http://www.mobinode.com/2010/12/17/china-is-changing-public-telephone-booths-into-wifi-hotspot/

How will this development influence the form and function of Digital Playrooms?

Ghetto Film School: Digital Playroom?

Frequent readers of this blog will recognise a persistent theme here: Digital Playrooms and the NT Government's commitment to provide 5 of them by 2012.

The mission of The Ghetto Film School is to educate, develop and celebrate the next generation of great American storytellers. Their three different program offerings are dedicated to teaching the art of cinematic storytelling to the young people of New York City. In addition to the students and educators of GFS, they are supported by a wide network of corporate sponsors, government agencies, and film making professionals.

Multi Unit iPod Charger Top 5 FAQs

1. Does the iPod Multi Unit charger work with a PC?
2. Can I sync apps with the iPod Multi Unit Docking Station?
3. Does iPod Charger Dock sync to all devices at once?
4. How long does it take to sync content to all of my devices?
5. Does the Multi Unit iPod Charger work with any iPod or iPhone device?

Answers here.

see also: Handheld Classroom Solutions

Guide to publishing a successful ebook

In an effort to make sense of the e-publishing landscape, Socialbrite compiled this list of user-friendly websites guaranteed to help your ebook reach an interested audience.

My Tours: Audio guide > iPhone app

Want to make an audio guide and publish it as an iPhone app? Then check out My Tours who have just been announced as a finalist in the NZ web awards, The Onyas. Good luck Glen!

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2011

1. Social media will be supersized
2. Companies will integrate social feedback into their decision making process
3. Mobile will become our gateway to the world
4. Video will be everywhere
5. The next big Online Social Network will not be a network at all
6. ROI will be redefined
7. Psychology is shifting
8. Citizen activism brings back purpose and power
9. Social business intelligence will heat up and so will privacy
10. The role of the social media strategist will be changing

Read the complete article at Read Write Web

2010 Library of the Year

YouTube - Columbus Metropolitan Library

Taking the ICT Quest to the Heart of the Community, with TeleCentres & Co-ops

To quote the article... "Ideally ICT Education should be provided free, with specific purposes in mind eg. smart jobs, traded-services, healthcare & wellness services."

With regard to Territory 2030, what will be the purpose of Digital Playrooms?

Taking the ICT Quest to the Heart of the Community, with TeleCentres & Co-ops: From dotCom Bust...

Immersive mirror installation

5 projectors, 15 mirrors and some cool photographs. Voila!



YouTube - Behind the scenes: making the immersive mirror experience in Creating the look

Measuring the value of culture

This report explores the debates around cultural value, considering the meaning of culture and the reasons why valuation of culture is such a difficult task. The report considers several solutions to the problem of how to value culture, giving an overview of techniques from environmental and health economics, arts and humanities research and recent studies on subjective wellbeing.

Transmedia Practice

"Transmedia involves the combining of multiple creative practices on a diverse range of platforms or artforms to deliver a cohesive, multi-sited, experience"

Transmedia is similar to 'cross platform', but differs in some subtle but important ways. A transmedia producer starts their whole creative development process by thinking about the many ways that a story can be told across all sorts of different media, often at the same time. One story has many different entry points, with each audience member possibly only receiving a percentage of the whole story available. A book is a website that involves game play and live on-street theatre. It sounds complex, and in a production sense it is! But it's a truly dynamic collaborative creative effort, where the audience chooses their level of experience. What exists afterwards are the fragments of documentation and the memories of the 'players'.

Read more here.




Read Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited

See also Christy's Corner of the Universe

27 Elements of the New Work Paradigm

Article at The Fertile Unknown

Digital Playrooms: 3-step framework

Read this article through the lens of the NT Government's commitment to provide five Digital Playrooms by 2012 and a recommendation made to the 'Building Our Museums and Art Galleries Sector' consultancy to provide immediate and practical assistance in the digital realm.

Content Strategy for the Web

Content Strategy for the Web explains how to create and deliver useful, usable content for your online audiences, when and where they need it most.

What are narrative fractals?

Six elements can be found wherever we look carefully into what goes into (scale-insensitive) narratives of interaction.

These elements are:

* Attractor – interest-generating opener [emotion: curiousity]
* Challenge – disruptor of settled understandings/relationships [emotion: tension]
* Opportunity – vision of a desired outcome [emotion: inspiration]
* Strategy – path to realize vision [emotion: hope]
* Test – trial to confirm strategy [emotion: confidence]
* Decision – implement strategy, reframe/reloop, discard [emotion: resolve]

This pattern can be used to tag activities in physical and social realms, regardless the scale of the entities involved.

In social interactions with others, the narrative fractal pattern may influence what we opt to focus on as we quickly scan an environment. The narrative fractal elements also can be used in tagging (see http://j.mp/bTzT1W ) memorable conversations, in categorizing the assembly of conversations and events that make up subplots, in seeing the pattern that assemblies of subplots form to make up a story, in mapping the convergence of stories that comprise an epic, and in sensing how a combination of epics create an overarching belief system or a religion.

In scientific engagement with our environment, the narrative fractal can be described as:

attention->challenge->hypothesis->experimental design->trials->conclusion

In science, the assembly of small hypotheses and experiments on these lines similarly can scale to grand theories and to revolutions in scientific paradigms.

Such a scale-independent method of processing of experience also may have been at work in the evolution of organelles into single cells, cells into multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms into complex beings.

Read more here.

See also: Is this what a Narrative Fractal looks like?

Top 3 Code Editors For the iPad

Article at Read Write Web

Designing the Edge-in Organization

Organisations are subject to the second law of thermal dynamics....

The 10 Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010

Dear Santa... please buy MAGNT The 10 Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010

Joint leadership models in the visual arts

What does an Executive Director bring to the table and how do successful joint leadership models work? Analysis here.

Smartphones, Superphones and Subphones – What Comes Next?

Where will the underlying wave of technological and commercial innovation strike next in smartphones? Three answers deserve attention.... more at Wireless Week

Flexible Display

YouTube - Flexible Display

5 Mobile Trends for Museums

Presentation by JASON DAPONTE

My Guide

My guide is an interactive guide made for smart phones that uses the museum as an interactive playground where visitors can generate paths and connections through their activities.
With My Guide the visitor can take pictures, tag the artworks, add notes, sketch on others notes, and share the captured experience via social networks to the artists itself, museum curators and friends.
By doing so the visitors modify the museum content and influence the possible interactions between the artworks and the exhibition space itself.

Mediamatic.net - My guide

CultureNOW

The Museum Without Walls brings to life CultureNOW's years research and cultural mapping. With the advent of new technologies, culture seekers can curate their own tours of sites from our website and also via an iPhone app. CultureNOW's Museum Without Walls is content rich - with to date, over 4,000 sites listed, self-guided tours, and commentary from artists, architects, planners, designers, historians, government officials who give special insight into the places that collectively enrich our cultural environment.

Future Phone

Who's Using Twitter?

Given that this blog is primarily comprised of articles I've farmed via Twitter, its appropriate that I share with you some stats about Who's Using Twitter?

Triggering Conversions on Your Site

Where the rubber meets the road... Triggering Conversions on Your Site

Appstorm's Best of 2010

The Best Web Apps
The Best iPhone & iPad Apps
The Best Mac Software

10 Surefire Ways to Screw Up Your iPhone App

So you want to build the next smash hit iPhone app? Extraordinary design is key to getting the attention of users and of Apple, so if an app exudes a stench of mediocrity, Apple won’t feature it and app shoppers probably won’t download it (even if they do, they won’t share it with others). The following are ten common iPhone app design and usability mistakes that can shatter hopes of success on the App Store.

The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2010

Laugh Out Loud! The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2010

Transmedia Victoria » Workshops

On the 27th and 28th of January 2011, Victoria will host a special one-time only event focused entirely on transmedia. Transmedia professionals from around the world and Australia will come together with artists in film, TV, theatre, gaming, music, literature and digital sectors. It is an event for directors, artistic directors, writers, designers, producers, and project managers. More information here.

Access to and use of Public Sector Information

auPSI is at the heart of developing information policy about delivering access to and encouraging the use of public sector information (PSI) for social, cultural and economic advancement. Download publications relating to Creative Commons copyright here.

How Cultural Heritage Tourism Organizations Can Beat The Recession

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Heritage Tourism Program (USA) has created a survival toolkit with three key components:

* 11 survival strategies culled from in-depth interviews with hundreds of people and organizations nationwide
* Case studies that illustrate those strategies in action
* Links to other online toolkits for additional information on moving forward in a bad economy

Read more here.

Field notes from 'Paying the Costs of Making Things Free'

Conference report by Lotte Belice Baltussen and Wietske van den Heuvel here.

Does Your Passion Match Your Aspiration?

Leaders who create extraordinary new possibilities are passionate about their mission and tenacious in pursuit of it. Many people have good ideas, but many fewer are willing to put themselves on the line for them. Passion separates good intentions and opportunism from real accomplishments. To determine whether your passion matches your aspirations, try these 12 questions....

Best Social Media Books of 2010

Dear Santa... please deliver some/ all of the following Best 15 Recommended Social Media Books of 2010 this year.

Mobile Adventure @ Balboa Park

A new way to see the park takes one back in time while testing one’s detective skills in a cell-phone adventure game that’s part scavenger hunt, part information, part half-hour easy walk and wholly entertaining. Read all about it at SignOnSanDiego.com

Why Visit? 3 iPhone Apps for Historic Places

The best historic places apps create a soft spot in your heart that you don’t forget by taking you on a mental journey... at Museums2Go

Open data in the arts: an introduction

Open data sounds like a much more techie concept than it really is. It's really a way to let third parties plug into and spread your organization's information, in a way that you control, and allows them to create publications, products and services that you don't have the time, resources or inclination to develop or maintain.

More at Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab

Information doesn’t drive behavior change; Identity does

The public’s (non)reaction to the mountains of data in support of human-driven climate change should be of interest to anyone engaged in an attempt to influence behavior through messaging. Whether you’re a card-carrying environmentalist or not, this phenomenon deserves attention because it indicates that our attempts at making the world a better place through the dispersal of information are bound to fail. In Behavior change causes changes in beliefs, not vice versa, David Roberts explains why Al Gore’s strategy of emphasizing the magnitude of the climate change problem in order to drive behavior change didn’t work.

Information and logic don’t drive people’s behavior — even if they think it does. Roberts says that it’s behavior that drives beliefs. And what, then, drives behavior? Identity. We do things to enforce who we think we are. So… if you want to change behaviors, you must appeal to your audience’s sense of identity.

More at The Nature of Story

Changing the Innovation Culture from the Bottom Up

It is unfortunately very difficult to influence top executives. One of several reasons is that you often need to go through your direct own boss, then his or her boss and perhaps even one or two steps further. There are lots of people with their own views on innovation that you need to get by before you reach the top executives. And they might not even listen if you are able to reach them… So what can you do?

Answers here.

Gen Y Accessing Web On Mobile More Than PC

This should be extremely sobering data for those who think that mobile is next year’s problem or challenge. Survey results here.

How To Build an Online Community

If you're launching a website or app today, you need to build a community around your content. But how? Some sites explode while other nearly identical sites wither.... Read Kristen Taylor @ The Atlantic

Seven Social Transformations Unleashed by Mobile Devices

A ubiquitous technology redefines the way we engage with people, information, and companies. Read more at Technology Review

7 Tips for Succeeding as a Social Media Strategist

1. Be Proactive, Not Reactive
2. Be a Program Manager, Not Evangelist
3. Educate Your Business Units
4. Organize for Success
5. Be an Enabler
6. Deploy Scalable Social Media Programs
7. Transcend Marketing

Complete article at American Express OPEN Forum

Making museum mobile 'impact'

Making mobile 'impact'

View more presentations from Loic Tallon.

Appraise & Select Research Data for Curation

This guide will help you develop a managed approach to appraising and selecting datasets for curation.

Tate Online Strategy 2010-12

Given the rapidly developing scope and potential of digital communications, Tate Online is uniquely placed to reach new audiences and engage them in new ways...

More at Tate Papers Issue 13 2010

Should cultural institutions be in the business of "romance" or "precision"?

In the old days — say, mid 20th century — the rap on museums and the performing arts was that they were set up for people who already knew something about the content. You had to bring your own knowledge in order to make sense of the Latin-filled labels in a natural history museum. Times have changed, of course. The sector has made big strides toward democratic accessibility. But if arts and culture institutions are no longer catering narrowly to the cognoscenti, there’s still a sense in which they’re catering to the converted. You may not have to bring your own knowledge, but you do usually have to bring your own interest in the subject. What about the newcomers? What about people in the categories we culture professionals dub “experience seekers” or “cultural tourists”. Shouldn’t the experience be designed for them, too? Isn’t that the only way to broaden the audience over time?

Read more at Slover Linett Strategies

Collective Intelligence in Workplaces

...If collaboration only seeks to share data, information, files, records, workflow and teamwork, we would be missing an important link, the one that we get when we make our team not only collaborate by joining and adding their tasks and goals to accomplish a common goal, but make them share knowledge and building a community of practice. Then we will have commitment, global thinking, enhance competences, experience, dynamic deeds and all gaps will be fulfilled, a collaborative knowledge teamwork which provides the best of information, planning, skills and training.

Read more at Collaboration Ideas

The Internet and the Arts

New report dissects the digital arts audience for the first time

Gaze-Tracking & Museums

A paper on Current Research and Implications.

In a nutshell, information is delivered to the user on the basis of where they look. Awesome!

The future of storytelling

not an author and a reader > a collision of co-creators
not reading or watching > playing and procreating
not a product > a process
not a tidy straight line > a mosaic in constant motion, a pattern that you can view from any perspective
not a beginning and an end > the end of the beginning, middle and end
not a frozen narrative > a connective imagination, a dream of a dream that we dream together
not fiction but not fact > the elastic middle where real and not real meet
not a work of art that you pause your life to take in > a stream within a stream of your own lifestream

By cloudhead

The Digital Native: Myth & Reality

This paper offers a critical perspective on popular and political understandings of young people and digital technologies – characterised by notions of ‘digital natives’, the ‘net generation’ and other commonsense portrayals of expert young technology users. The paper considers the accuracy of such descriptions in reflecting young people’s actual uses of digital technology and digital information, arguing that a misplaced technological and biological determinism underpins many current portrayals of children, young people and digital technology. Having presented a more realistic basis for approaching generational differences in technology use, the paper explores the functions and roles that information professionals (especially librarians, teachers and other information specialists) can be expected to play in supporting young people in the digital age.

Read more here.

5 Do's & Don't for Better Social Media in Government

GovLoop - Social Network for Government

Transformations in Cultural Communication 2011

Melbourne, 14-15 April 2011. Details and registration here.

Social media glossary

The Top 100 words & phrases in the social media dictionary by Socialbrite

Web 2.0 productivity tools

A roundup of apps & resources to make your day go easier at Socialbrite

A Vision for Museum 2030

In late 2010, the Brooklyn Museum took the extraordinary step of discontinuing its efforts to engage with faraway virtual consumers to focus on tools that got people together face-to-face and, more importantly, connected them to the physical reality of museum content. This radical move asserted that communities needed to move beyond online consumption and embrace physical participation in order to satisfy the goals of museum-goers and the institutions they might visit. We didn’t know it at the time, but getting people thus engaged built upon the only quality that truly differentiated museums from any other producers of content.

A tidal wave soon followed as more museums elevated their furtive online social experiments to more full-bodied engagement programs. A museum in St. Louis figured out that communities have always been dependent on purpose more than entertainment, so it keyed its ecology exhibit into the curriculum of the local public grade schools and encouraged kids and parents to join a community that would help them learn. A technology museum in San Francisco created weekly on-site events for computer programmers to discuss how to best adapt an ongoing exhibit on AI.

Now there are communities that participate in everything from genetic research and archeological digs, to oil painting restoration and poetry...all through engagement campaigns (both online and off) that create topical, timed, and purpose-driven reason for them to get involved and bring them into museums. It’s odd that less than a decade ago we celebrated Twitter subscriber lists as accomplishments of community, when now we have engaged consumers who are also participants in museum visits and purchasers of museum content.

What’s the future look like? Now that museum communities are real, the next decade will herald a new era of creativity. It’s possible that by 2030 we’ll see museums routinely involve their communities in the vetting of information, selection and design of exhibits, and other forms of mediated crowd-sourcing. Members could get engaged with what’s inside museums before it’s ever inside.

Read more at the Center for the Future of Museums

Social Media, Mobiles & Museums

Presented by leading thinkers and museum experts, the papers provide an incisive, up-to-the-minute analysis of trends in the use of mobile devices by museum audiences, with a special focus on outreach efforts to under-served communities. Among the many important contemporary issues covered in this publication are:

* How social networking and mobility tools can help museums connect with their audiences
* Assessments of current tools and systems
* How these tools can help enrich and extend the learning experience
* The principles that guide new social media applications
* How to integrate social media applications into contemporary museum practice
* What the future holds for mobile media devices and social networking in the museum setting
* Data-driven analyses of developments in the field
* Insightful distillations of museum experiences to date
* Forecasts of trends and developments “just around the corner”.

Download the paper here.

Chamber of Arts and Culture

What is a Chamber of Arts and Culture? Western Australia is about to find out. Just like the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, it is made up of some seriously heavyweight businesspeople. Among them Sam Walsh, the CEO of Rio Tinto Iron Ore, and Janet Holmes à Court, who's well known across the country for her business and arts interests.

Also on the board are representatives from WA's arts and cultural organisations, including Jude van der Merwe. Jude and Janet join Amanda Smith in the studio to speak about this new venture and its possibilities.

Download the podcast here.

Free Movies Online @ Open Culture

The best free cultural & educational media on the web is available at Open Culture

Smartphones And Their Potential To Support Family Learning in the Cultural Sector

This report investigates whether smartphones in general and iPhones in particular offer new opportunities for the cultural sector to connect with Mums and indeed families in all their forms? Could we harness some of the energy and excitement we saw in the playful response to smartphones to help improve family visits to museums or draw families into museums? What was the potential?

This report summarises some of the trends we have identified in smartphones and their usage, the key family needs within museums and how the two might map onto one another to support family learning within the cultural sector – identifying opportunities and challenges for organisations in the years ahead.

Research and Reports | Frankly, Green + Webb

Digital Technologies & the Museum Experience

Loic Tallon has just released a book: this link is to an extract.

The Two Dimensions of Market Orientation

Both requirements correspond to distinct capabilities, timelines and approaches. Meeting existing needs tends to happen on a short term range and often leads to innovation derived from current markets. Anticipation often addresses future needs and is the basis to create new markets. Some companies have the propensity towards developing and exploiting existing markets. Others, such as Apple, are primarily targeted at tapping new markets by offering novel ‘proposals’. Successful companies of the future will most likely be able to combine both capabilities – in order to serve innovators, early adopters as well as the majority in the innovation diffusion cycle.

Read more at Game-Changer

Art • Youth • Culture

Australian Government funding for schools explained at Australian Policy Online

Art • Youth • Culture report with Arts Council response here.

Wall of Failure

You can tell a lot about an organization by how they treat failure. Do they focus on the learning or do they focus on the punishment? Read more by Tom Fishburne

Toolkit for Innovative Thinking

When you're working on a project, things always go smoother when you have the right tools at hand.

If your mind is working on something innovative, the same is true.The mind is full of ideas from past experiences and from observations gained through conversations, movies, television, etc. While you may chose to rely on your subconscious mind to access these ideas, why not take a more structured approach, using specific tools and techniques?

In her book “The Seeds of Innovation”, Elaine Dundon has created a systems thinking approach to innovation. At first those two thoughts seem contradictory, but in reality it can become a very powerful synergy. For example, here’s a “toolkit” you can dive into when you are faced with a challenge...

Digital Curation Centre

Anyone who has an obligation to store, manage and protect digital data can turn to the DCC for expert advice and practical help.

Social Media Policy for a Museum

I found these documents that may be useful to anyone looking to write a guideline for their organisation.

20 Things I Learned...

For things you’ve always wanted to know about the web but were afraid to ask, read 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

You Are What You Do

How to build a culture of innovation by Innovation Leadership Network

Hub Melbourne Incubator: Digital Playroom?

The Hub is about the power of people with ideas. It’s about the audacity, optimism and drive of the people who believe they can change things. Change minds, change lives, and ultimately change the world a little. Another world is not just possible, it’s happening. In the same way that an ecosystem is about the interaction of living things with their environment, the Hub is about the power of inspiring places where new connections, relationships and initiatives can evolve, adapt and thrive.

Read more here

And they're not alone: click this for similar Aus incubators.

Hub Melbourne Overview - September 2010

11 Excellent Solutions for Making Your Website Mobile Friendly

Read more here.

Google, Apple, Smartphones and Near Field Communications

Google and Apple are working on shake-to-pay smartphones. Don't blink, because Near Field Communications (NFC) might soon become a household term before you know it.

Read more at iOnApple

Why You Should Focus on "Worst Practices"

If you want to be disruptive, don't start with best practices. Try, instead, to find your industry's worst practices and take tiny steps — or better yet, giant leaps — towards bettering them.

So how do you find your worst practices? Here are four ways to get started.

1. Ask your critics
2. Spend a day in the trenches
3. Examine your past
4. Diet on your own dogfood

Read more by Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

Another Digital Playroom Model ?

The NT Government has committed itself to establishing 5 'Digital Playrooms' by 2012. Could this be a model?

Wilurarra Creative supports young adults to build strong communities and strong artistic practices in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands (Western Australia). Wilurarra Creative’s vision is to create a wider horizon for young people and support their cultural and creative well being.

This best practice program of cultural maintenance and renewal uses a dynamic combination of traditional and contemporary creative art-forms. Wilurarra Creative's focus is with people aged 17-30 years, with the participation and leadership of the community's elders and role models to directly connect Wilurarra Creative's activities for transmission of culture and to ensure relevancy with Ngaanyatjarra people's wider social and cultural circumstances.

Within Wilurarra Creative's Centre people work on a range of different practices including: Music, fashion performance, land & cultural practice, digital media, print media and art and project consulting.

Check out their awesome website here.

See also: Mobile Digital Playroom ?

Libraries and Web 3.0

Semantic web standards are complex, and difficult to conceptualize, but they offer solutions to many of the issues that plague libraries, including precise web search, authority control, classification, data portability, and disambiguation. This article will outline some of the benefits that linked data could have for libraries, will discuss some of the non-technical obstacles that we face in moving forward, and will finally offer suggestions for practical ways in which libraries can participate in the development of the semantic web.

The Strongest Link: Libraries and Linked Data

Open source framework tools for cross-platform mobile apps

Phonegap, Sencha & Western Civilisation.

Science Media Centre Guide for Covering Science

Designed with busy journalists in mind, the Guide is aimed both at the reporters on science, health and environment rounds, and also at general reporters who’d like to get the science right. Download it here.

Open Exhibits

Open Exhibits is a multitouch, mulituser software initiative. The software is free to students, museums and other educational organizations. Download it here.

Research communication costs in Australia, emerging opportunities and benefits

The environment in which research is being conducted and disseminated is undergoing profound change, with new technologies offering new opportunities, changing research practices demanding new capabilities, and increased focus on research performance. Nevertheless, despite billions of dollars being spent by governments on R&D each year, relatively little policy attention has yet been paid to the dissemination of the results of that research through scholarly publishing. A key question facing us today is, are there new opportunities and new models for scholarly communication that could enhance the dissemination of research findings and, thereby, maximise the economic and social returns to public investment in R&D? By exploring the costs involved in scholarly communication activities and some of the potential benefits available through emerging scholarly communication alternatives, this study contributes to helping us answer this question. The study provides background information, which is intended to provide a basis for improved management of, and access to, research information, outputs and infrastructure so that they are discoverable, accessible and shareable. It also provides activity costing estimates for a range of core activities within the higher education sector that may prove useful in the management of institutional budgets and priorities.

Download the PDF at Victoria University

New museum open 24/7

Ever walk by a statue and wonder, "What made this guy so important?" or pass by a modern sculpture in a park and think, "What on earth is that supposed to be?" Now, in Philadelphia, there's an app for that. And similar apps exist for art and landmarks in other cities ranging from Seattle to New York.

Read more here.

Mobile Digital Storytelling

5 minute video demonstrating iPhone / iTouch / iPad apps by Moving at the Speed of Creativity

15 free tools for better online storytelling

List of resources compiled at News Designs

6 Free Sites for Creating Your Own Comics

Add these to your list of Digital Storytelling platforms.

Cost Model for Digital Preservation

The website includes information about the cost model, various pieces of documentation, and a tool destined for estimating the future costs of cultural heritage institutions' digital collections. Recommended reading for the BOMAGS consultancy: Cost Model for Digital Preservation

Augmented Reality Authoring for Digital Storytelling

Review of 7 Scenes.

maComfort

Get that Mac functionality on Windows! Free download here.

Scholarly Communications Action Handbook

This JISC Scholarly Communications Action Handbook provides guidance and suggested actions, in an effort to address researchers' scholarly communication concerns and improve current practices. The series of actions were created in consultation with the community and should help to establish change. The masterlist of actions is extensive (90 different actions), and is best navigated by starting at one of the following access points: stakeholder groups, activities, concerns or hot topics...

Home | Scholarly Communications Action Handbook

Augmented Reality for Cultural Institutions

Includes research on the way augmented reality has been applied to the cultural heritage sector.

MA Dissertation by Foteini Valeonti

See also by the same author: The Augmented Reality Suite for Museums

The 10 best museum websites

A list with links at Times Online

Digipedia

Digipedia has been designed to bring together in one place authoritative resources (standards, policies, case studies, good practice and links to expertise) on all aspects of the digital content life cycle. Check it our here.

10 reasons to blog even if nobody reads it

When your GM has seemingly unrealistic expectations about building an online blog community, pull this blog post out as a reminder that there are many solid business reasons to have a blog, even if the crickets aren't chirping in the comment section!

Read more here

Roundware

Roundware is a flexible, open-source interactive audio platform which can be used to create unique participatory audio experiences.

Round is part museum audio tour and part participatory audio blog. Using mobile networked devices, museum visitors are able to leave audio comments about the museum’s artworks as well as hear those of other museum visitors, artists and curators. Voices are combined with music in an individualized audio experience.

Read more here.

Related article: Best Audio Tour Ever!

50 Amazing Museum Exhibits You Can Enjoy Online

Museums stand as one of the most necessary cornerstones of human society. They introduce visitors to new ideas and concepts that they may not otherwise pick up in school or at home – thus, hopefully, nurturing intellectualism in the process. Many have now taken to the internet in order to promote everything from Pop Art to paleontology, making them excellent resources for parents, teachers, students and curious adults lacking the resources for globetrotting. Along with their brick-and-mortar exhibition halls, they set up virtual worlds for patrons to explore, many of them accomplishing feats too impractical or expensive to physically pull off. The following institutions offer up a blissfully broad range of online activities suitable for many different audiences. Absorb what they have to offer and gain a greater understanding of the weird and wonderful planet’s past, present and possible future.

50 Amazing Museum Exhibits You Can Enjoy Online

Flickr context harvester for archives

In the quest the upload once and distribute across multiple platforms, check out the the Flickr context harvester for archives

See also: Flickr machine tag challenge

Crowdsourcing and social engagement: potential, power and freedom for libraries and users

Can libraries respond to the shift in power and control of information and dare to give users something greater than power – freedom? Download this 28 page analysis here.

The Wealth of Networks

How Social Production Transforms Markets & Freedom

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passé today to speak of “the Internet revolution.” In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

A series of changes in the technologies, economic organization, and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century. This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.

Read Yochai Benkler's manuscript online here or download the PDF here.

Choosing The Right CMS for Your Small Business

The web is littered with articles comparing CMS’s and highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. Though helpful at the time, these articles can quickly become outdated and may, through no fault of their authors, lead you astray. So rather than focus on particular content management systems, this article will highlight some key areas in which you as the webmaster or decision maker should concentrate.

Labs at NMA

The National Museum of Australia is working on a number of experimental projects and they'd like to share them with you for comment.

See also: National Archives Lab (UK)

Forecasting the Future of Museums

WMA was pleased to have AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums Director Elizabeth Merritt lead two sessions on futurecasting.... more at westmuse.

See also: Digital Futures of cultural heritage education

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

Authored by members of the MetaArchive Cooperative, A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation is the first of a series of volumes describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit.

Download it here.

DigitalNZ

DigitalNZ is an initiative that aims to make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share and use. This includes content from government departments, publicly funded organisations, the private sector, and community groups.

We test and develop approaches that increase the amount of New Zealand content flowing through the Digital Content Life Cycle. New Zealand is a small place with big ideas, and we need to create and digitise more New Zealand content so we can stay digitally connected to our own stories, creations, knowledge and culture.

 

See also: Mix and Mash NZ

PhoneGap

Why is it a common perception that the future will be EITHER native apps OR Web pages? Web apps have the advantages of BOTH. PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iPod touch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs.

Mobile Design For iPhone & iPad

This e-book presents articles on professional mobile design for the iPhone as well as the iPad, including studies of trends in mobile design and guidelines for the development of mobile web pages. These articles are mostly a selection of the best from Smashing Magazine in 2009 and 2010, dealing with mobile design for the iPhone and iPad, plus an exclusive 90-page study about mobile web design trends.

How To Build A Mobile Website

Comprehensive article at Smashing Magazine

How Money Follows Attention... Eventually.

There has never been a better time to be a reader, a listener, or a watcher of human creativity. An exhilarating torrent of books, music, movies, games, apps, and interactive media creations rushes before us. Every year the river widens--in volume, diversity, and ease of access. In every dimension, media today is at a high-water mark of glorious plenitude.

But while consumers have never been better served, the publishers, broadcasters, studios, and labels that have been producing this content are worried sick that their end is near. Once masterpieces are digitized by ubiquitous chips, their bits instantly drain into a fast-flowing river of cheap data, removing the distinction between original and copy and destroying the business logic that funded their creation. To make matters worse, these same digitizing chips encourage amateurs to get out of their armchairs and make, sell, and distribute what they themselves want to consume.

Nothing will stop the flow of bits, of course, but there is good reason to believe that some of the traditional intermediaries will survive and thrive again. The secrets to the new business models can be found in the data showing how money follows the only scarce resource we have: our time to pay attention.

Analysis & Metrics at Technology Review

Environmental Education for a Sustainable Future: National Action Plan

Read all about it and wonder what role m4D might play in raising the profile of environmental education.

The Meaning Organization

Traditional businesses are struggling to recover from the economic downturn. They'll need to shift their focus from profits to authentic social engagement to have meaningful impact in the world....

The Meaning Organisation by Umair Haque

The Mobile Developer Journey from App Design to Monetization

Infographics are great for quickly being able to parse and understand complex data. In this particular infographic, VisionMobile gives you a glance at the journey of the mobile developer from the very beginning with the platform selection process, to the end goal of monetization.

DomeLab 2010: Immersive Cinema Design

Download the PDF at Production Design for Fulldome « Dome Lab 2010.

See also: Swinburne Uni and Virtual Orchestra in AVIE and iCinema

ICH² - 360° Intermedia Dance Performance from Tom Duscher on Vimeo.

ICH² (Me to the power of 2) is an interacitve dance performance especially developed for fulldome planetariums. The performance combines expressive modern dance and 360° interactive motion graphics.

In this way ICH² is a very unique piece of the emerging genre called Digital Theatre, in which digital media technology enables alterable and imersive stage settings. Technical Setup using VVVV Fulldome Renderer.

A Cooperation of Muthesius Academy of Arts, Mediadome Kiel and Ballett Kiel, Germany.

Database of Full Dome cinemas

Mobile Technologies for Social Transformation

Technology, in and of itself, doesn’t bring about change and nor do Development Programmes. Ultimately it is people that bring about the transformation they desire and it is relationships that sustain it.

Historically, NGO’s have worked on a project basis, which on the face of it seems a reasonable approach; each project is self contained, it can receive specific donor funding, outcomes can be measured and final reports can be produced. However, this is changing as people do not live their lives on a project basis. Famers cannot delay planting, sick people do not cure themselves, clinics cannot close and trainers should not be released, whilst the ‘programme’ waits for another round of funding. In the past too many projects have delivered training to farmers or encouraged HIV testing with little thought of follow on or follow up. We all know this needs to change and that Sustainable Development means continued engagement.... more at Nimbus

Geek in Residence v2.0 - call for applications

The Geek in Residence initiative was developed in response to the Australia Council's arts organisation community, who have asked for help developing their digital skills and confidence. The process is that those arts organisations can apply for up to $25,000 (which must be matched in cash) to go toward the cost of employing a geek for up to 12 months. The potential host arts organisations need to tell us what outcomes they hope to see in three main areas; artistic programming, audience development and general operations. These applications are reviewed by an internal committee of art form directors who are familiar with the needs of these clients. the successful hosts will be announced at the end of December 2010

More information at artsdigitalera.

Constructive Capitalism

Video of keynote address at Vimeo

So the world is kind of a function of what we do. And when we act in one way, we create one kind of industry, one kind of environment, one kind of world; and when we act in another way, we can create a very different kind of environment, or industry, or world. And so I think the question of “how do we respond to the world”, we have to think about the fact that we are responsible for the actions that we take, because those actions then go on to create the kind of world that then comes back to effect us. And so the challenge in the 21st century is learning to create authentic value, real value.

Apps4D: Smartphone Application Development as ICT4D

The rise of the smartphone has unleashed a wave of excitement and income generation across the software development community. Applications that can run on iPhones, Android phones and Blackberry's, can be written quickly, and on the cheap, and have generated outsized returns for their creators. Even more impressive is that this application revolution is just starting.... cont'd at ICTWorks

Parramatta Becomes Australia's First Digital City

Parramatta, a city in the Australian state of New South Wales, is on the way to becoming a showcase city for the integration of digital services into community life in that country.

The project, Parra Connect, focuses on a suburban community and cover about 50,000 households. It is the first such digital city in the country and one of the first in the world, though it is part of an increasing trend.

Read more here.

Digital Arts Centre @ Parramatta

Switch Digital Arts Centre is a storytelling playground. It’s a space where we will actively encourage dynamic interaction between creative individuals and communities. It’s a creative space that we hope will become a gathering place for communities from all walks of life. Located on 8 Victoria Rd, Parramatta, just a 15-minute walk from Parramatta train station, Switch is a cutting edge warehouse space with commercial-quality digital media hardware and software, industry experts and professional practitioners.
Switch Digital Arts Centre is powered by Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE). It was created to provide a space for the next wave of diverse artists, entrepreneurs and cultural practitioners. Join us here for training and workshops or to seek out our professional development services.
Come and play! Whether you’re an emerging or established artist, or a passionate and creative entrepreneur, we look forward to seeing you soon.

Related article: Paramatta becomes Australia's first Digital City

Digital Public Space

After two years analysing the content, framework and potential of the BBC's archive, Ageh's conclusion is that many of the challenges – not least rights, accessibility and the cost of digitisation – are shared by other public institutions. So his vision is to create a new "digital public space" for publicly owned content.

The Digital Public Space proposal is still being developed with organisations including the British Film Institute and the British Library. Essentially it would be a new layer of the internet in which institutions would make publicly owned content available, free, for non-commercial public use. That content could be used elsewhere for commercial projects at a cost.

"This notion of the public space allows content to be amphibious rather than only commercial or public sector. It would allow the web to be as commercial as it needs to be, but structured in a way that you couldn't retrospectively apply to the web." It would, he claims, stimulate the creative economy, drive digital literacy and maximise public value. The Digital Public Space idea is as brilliant as it is ambitious. "As a nation, we need to decide that we are going to create an environment where every one of our citizens can get value from these technologies," he says. "The BBC should facilitate this, but it is an opportunity for these technologies to remind all our national institutions what they were trying to achieve in the first place."

Tony Ageh on the BBC Archive and how to remake the internet | Media | The Guardian

Related article: A New Digital Presence: The Smithsonian Commons and the Digital Commons Charter 

See also an invitation to debate 'paying the cost of making things free'

20 Little Known Sites for Watching Shows Online

Internet Providers: 20 Little Known Sites for Watching Shows Online

Social Value Creation: How To Manufacture Wisdom

Social Value Creation: How To Manufacture Wisdom

The Digital Curation Exchange

The Digital Curation Exchange has been created to serve as a space for conversation, sharing and interaction among practitioners, researchers, educators, and students of digital curation. The site has been designed to take advantage of various social networking capabilities.

Introduction to Mobile Phones for Development

This report aspires to provide an overview of studies on mobile telephony in a developing country context.

Case Study: Tailoring Access to Online Collections through Interpretive Resources

To both help audiences learn about our collections and open more pathways to our institutional information and knowledge, the Art Institute sought to improve online access to unique interpretive content such as our growing archive of scholarly lectures, collections-based lesson plans, teacher manuals, videos, digital simulations, classroom activities, maps, etc. To this end, we created tailored landing pages with common navigational elements and search results pages focused on three audiences: the Educator Resource Finder for educators; Multimedia for audiences seeking audio or video content; and Collections for the Online Collections visitor.

Learn more here.

Social learning and radical innovation

When people talk about social learning, there’s often a tendency to act as if providing the technology to bring people together (microblogging, forums, wikis, etc) will necessarily result in knowledge sharing and that knowledge sharing will necessarily result in new, better approaches. But as we all know, the human element of that equation and the complex circumstances of most problems can make things quite a bit more messy.... a roadmap through the quagmire available at Instructional Design Fusions

Omeka.net Blog

Big news at Omeka.net Blog. After more than two years of planning and development, and six months of Alpha testing, CHNM is pleased to announce the public launch of Omeka.net Beta. Anyone may sign up for an account today.

Mobile Digital Playroom Model?

The Northern Territory Government has a commitment to establishing five Digital Playrooms by 2012 as part of its Territory 2030 Strategy.

So that answers 'when'. But 'what, why, where and how' are Digital Playrooms... when time, money and digital curation policy are in such short supply and the NT diaspora is so incredibly vast?  It's a daunting prospect that requires an innovative response.

The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is a mobile audio and video production facility.

Its The Edge on wheels.... sort of: The Edge has many programs with different technologies at their core running simultaneously. Perhaps Mobile Digital Playrooms could come in different flavours...?!

Regardless, if you add this digital media production capacity to Living Arts projects on Growth Towns, you'd get an excellent return on investment.

Imagine a circus workshop on a community... add a mobile digital playroom focused on making media about the circus workshop and making content to integrate into the finale show, and uploading everything to a digital commons that allows content to be shared, mashed and made. We know that NT youth are already using mobile devices for content creation and that Growth Towns have 3G coverage... the potential is for the whole concept to go completely viral.

Indirectly, its also a cool strategy for building up the Museums and Art Galleries sector by 1) producing lots of content that can populate the 'Territory Digital Commons' and 2) skilling up Growth Town digital media producers 3) leaving behind virtual infrastructure that enhances social well being 4) providing employment opportunities for geeks, art workers and artists : A triple bottom line I suggest that will nurture sustainability across the creative industries ecosystem.

Pairing a Mobile Digital Playroom with a Sports Program would work well also ... as it would if it were paired with a health promotion initiative at the Health Clinic or a driver license registration course at the community Police Station... adding digital media production to 'uncool' programs might just make them very cool.

Related articles:

• Geeks open gateways for the Arts
• Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy
• The Rise Of The Transmedia Storyteller 
• Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
• The Next 5 Years in Social Media
• 41 Ways Museums Are Merging Social & Tech to Engage Audiences

The Origins of Good Ideas

The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends, writes Steven Johnson at WSJ.com

SepiaTown

SepiaTown is a website that lets you search, view, and upload historical images by location. A great resource for location based tourism using mobile devices.... Check it out here.

Sustainable Museums: Strategies for the 21st Century

This is not a book about changing light bulbs… Sustainable Museums provides a system enabling you to start making changes that are both transformational and lasting. It will help you create a museum that is resilient, confident and secure.

Purchase a copy at MuseumsEtc

Rethinking the Mobile Web

Great Slideshare presentation! Make sure you check this out before committing to a mobile strategy.

How to Build an App without a Developer

Article aimed at small business but applicable elsewhere. Via American Express OPEN Forum

see also: FormEntry & AppMakr

Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling

Great site with valuable resources by University of Houston. See also this list

The Eight-Word Mission Statement

Most companies, regardless of their sectors, have a mission statement. And most are awash in jargon and marble-mouthed pronouncements. Worse still, these gobbledy-gook statements are often forgotten by, misremembered, or flatly ignored by frontline employees.

To combat this, Starr insists that companies he funds can express their mission statement in under eight words. They also must follow this format: Verb, target, outcome. This approach is refreshingly sparse, and really helps to clarify the thinking. Learn more about it at the Harvard Business Review

Screens & Museums

Here are some of the qualities that screens provide... via Museum Media

Why community broadcasters should care about the NBN

Digital technologies and new media open up more people than ever to producing their own content and having their voices heard. These are values that community broadcasting has been championing for decades and it’s great that these technologies are facilitating more voices, but too often we are focusing on the platforms and the technologies and not the people. Some content makers are self sufficient and make outstanding content that represents their perspective and their story to the world, but our society is still grossly unequal and many people aren’t comfortable or have the skills to effectively exercise their voice.

The analogy is handing someone the keys to the car, but not teaching them how to drive. You’d get something like this:

- Some people will drive at 5km’s an hour until they figure it out, by which time they could have just walked to their destination.

- Some will put their foot flat on the accelerator, run over a few bunnies on the way and figure it out.

- Some will drive around in circles until the petrol runs out.

- And some will crash the moment they touch the car.

You wouldn’t give someone the keys to your car without teaching and supporting them how to use it. We should be careful not to do the same with online and digital technologies.

more at JB’s Blog

41 Ways Museums Are Merging Social & Tech to Engage Audiences

Technology is a powerful tool for cultivating community, and the merging of social and tech in museums is occurring more and more frequently. Here are 41 favorite examples of museums building social capital through social media and technological endeavours.

See also: 8 Awesome Ways Museums Are Embracing Tech & Social Media

Mobile Web Application Best Practices

The goal of this document is to aid the development of rich and dynamic mobile Web applications. It collects the most relevant engineering practices, promoting those that enable a better user experience and warning against those that are considered harmful.

How to Select the Right Open-Source Database

Just in case you were wondering... click here.

Best Audio Tour Ever !

'Scapes' augments the physical landscape of the park with a location-sensitive layer of audio. This audio layer contains a mixture of instrumental music and spoken voices - contributed by participants - both of which are influenced by the participant's location within the sculpture park. As such, the participant's body becomes the primary mode of interaction with this project; as they move through the park, they control how their individual audioscape unfolds by shifting the instrumental music and "running into" audio left by other participants.









When Nancy Proctor praises your audio tour, you know you've done well. Read all about 'Scapes' with links to download the app at MuseumMobile Wiki. Alternate rave about the same app here. And another review here: seems everyone is impressed!

See also: PsychoGeographic AudioTour

Help stop the spread of NIBS (Native is Better Syndrome)

Compelling arguments - and equally erudite rebuttals in the comments section of the blog - to debunk the 'native apps are intrin­si­cally bet­ter than web apps' meme at Web Directions

See also: Shiny App Syndrome & Gov 2.0

Organizations and Complexity

Stop thinking like a hierarchy, with titles and reporting relationships, and start framing the enterprise in terms of networks. Mapping value networks is a start, as is talking about social networks and supporting them through the use of social media. If you look at work differently and talk about it differently, then new conversations and attitudes will result.

Here are some ideas, for starters:

• Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram
• Move away from counting hours, to a results oriented work environment
• Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network
• Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed. Build an ecosystem or join one.

More by Harold Jarche here

Paying the Cost of Making Things Free

The Economies of the Commons conference (Nov 12 & 13) will critically examine the economics of on-line public domain and open access cultural resources, also known as the digital commons. While proponents praise these resources for their low-cost barriers, accessibility and collaborative structures, critics claim they undermine established (proprietary) production without offering a viable business strategy of their own.

Because the sustainability of open content resources remains unclear, this conference explores alternative revenue models and novel institutional structures that can fund and safeguard these materials. What new hybrid solutions for archiving, preserving and retrieval can both create viable markets and serve the public interest in a competitive global 21st century information economy? How should we restructure the economic frameworks in which content producers and cultural archives operate?

This event seeks to connect researchers, theorists, economists and activists in order to analyze the political economy of open content and its consequences for the cultural sector.

Mike Edson talk: Smithsonian Commons

Mike Edson, Smithsonian Institution’s Director of Web and New Media Strategy, talks about his work and the Smithsonian Commons, a new part of the Smithsonian’s digital presence dedicated to to Smithsonian resources, communities, and expertise. The Smithsonian Commons project is just beginning, but the commons concept and the strategy behind it reveal important ideas about reputation, risk, and the changing work of public institutions in the 21st century.

70 minute video at Powerhouse Museum

The Handheld Guide: Experimenting with Mobile Technology in Museums

The popular view of mobile technology seems to be focused (a little too much?) on one main format – having a downloadable, mobile application. While developing your own app can be a good way to deliver content to your visitors, it is definitely not the only approach. Thomas Hughes decided to take a look at four different ways that some museums have been experimenting and implementing mobile tech in their institutions at Technology in the Arts.

Mobilizethis

MOBILIZETHIS 2010 is a free face-to-face and virtual online event that brings together education, training and practicing researchers committed to exploring innovative mobile teaching and learning practice. The 2010 theme is exploring the role of creative industries and the creative potential that we employ to realise teaching, learning and research, in the mobile context.

Charles Darwin University
Wednesday 20th - Friday 22nd October
Program guide here
#mobilizethis10 - keep tabs on the Twitter discussion

Mobile Learning

A kerbillion links for mobile learning resources for Educators.

Woices: Sell your audio guides!

So far, professionals and institutions who subscribed our sponsored guides service could publish their guides at no cost for the final user. Now, we have extended our service to allow them to sell their guides. So now, pros can either publish and distribute their guides for free or charge the final user for them.

In the future, users will be able to buy these premium guides from their mobile phone but before that (and due to the large number of request) we have set up a physical ticketing (coupon) system. That means pros can now download or ask us the send them a stack of tickets or coupons (which, in the end, is a simple code that will unlock the guide) allowing them to sell the guides in the real world. That's something that suits museums, exhibitions or any content creator that has a booth or box office. Every coupon has detailed instructions on how to download the woices app, launch the guide and unlock the guide with the provided single-use code in their smartphones (iPhone or Android).

In this is only our first step towards a unique tech-neutral service that will allow our pro users (content creation companies, institutions, etc.) to:

1. Create and update audio guides using our simple web interface.
2. Sell them virtually (via web or smartphone) or physicalle (selling tickets).
3. Distribute them to any smartphone platforms (iPhone, iPads, Androids, Blackberries).

All this without having to think about developing apps or technologies for every major smartphone technology! Let them focus on content! (which, by the way is always the king...)

If you want more information, contact us at: info@woices.com

Woices Official Blog

The Digital Deadlock

How clearance and copyright issues are keeping Australian content offline: download the report at Centre for Screen Business

3D holographic video

Musion Eyeliner is a high definition 3D holographic video projection system allowing a spectacular 3-dimensional moving life-size hologram to appear within a live stage setting using Peppers Ghost technology.

Musion Systems on Vimeo

The Rise Of The Transmedia Storyteller

The new law of digital relativity (e.g., the relationship between time and space) means the end of scarcity. This was the currency that, for years, powered marketing budgets, filled media coffers and drove the information economy. Now that scarcity is gone, however, we will need to adopt a new set of skills.

Enter the Transmedia Storyteller.

Even though millions of us are now content producers in some form or another, the reality is there's still chasm when it comes to quality. There's art and there's junk. Audiences want art.

To stand out today it's critical that businesses create content. Activating your cadre of internal subject matter experts is the surest path to visibility.

The reality is, however, that organizations need to do more than just unleash their subject matter experts en masse. They need to activate them in multiple channels at once and equip them in how to create a compelling narrative--an emerging set of skills called Transmedia Storytelling.

Transmedia Storytelling doesn't need to be fancy. It can be executed with low-budget tools. However, it does need to be thought through. It requires that a business' subject matter experts know how to simultaneously tell good stories and to do so using text, video, audio and images depending on the venue.

More at Forbes.com

CultureShock

CultureShock is currently one of the world's largest digital storytelling projects and this region-wide festival is packed with free digital screenings in unique locations across the region.

From a big screen at a spectacular fireworks display to secret late-night projections in city centres – find out what’s being shown near you.

Seek Conflicting Views to Improve Innovation

Innovation occurs when we creatively connect ideas in new and novel ways. If we are trying to differentiate ourselves, or our organisation, we need to be able to do this well. One way to approach this is to consciously seek out viewpoints and information that we normally wouldn’t encounter, or which conflict with our normal world view....

More at Innovation Leadership Network

Do Knowledge Assets Live In Communities?

Our culture organizes itself around winners and losers. Corporations reflect this competitive nature to the core of their Capitalist doctrine. Sports analogies abound across the enterprise straight through to the HR department always on the lookout for the most amount of superstar for the least amount of money.

Social media has every industry trying to understand the concept of community. Nature and our environment continues to demonstrate to humanity that there is far more cooperation going on than competition...

More at The Relationship Economy

Digital Literacy at What Price?

A cultural and cognitive shift is well underway in terms of how we access and process information via digital media. And a recent study confirms our suspicions: though we are becoming more tech savvy, it may be at the expense of creative and critical thinking. More at Anthropology in Practice

Solar-powered internet café set up in shipping container

It also happens to be in Zambia. Article here.

The transferability of ICT4D innovations from income-poor to income-rich countries

What would a more-focused effort to design and implement ICT4D innovations in richer countries look like? How would such an effort appeal to or draw on the expertise of the ICT4D community? Join the conversation on December 16th, from 3:30 to 5:00PM at Royal Holloway College, University of London as part of the ICT4D Conference. Registration closes 30^th November 2010. More detail at Technology & Social Change

Next Billion Network

Within the next three years, another billion people will begin to make regular use of cell phones, continuing the fastest adoption of a new technology in history. Soon, this next billion will make its voice heard—and connect to the global information network. This will unleash a wave of entrepreneurship, collaboration and wealth creation, turning the newly connected into a powerful force in the world economy. The kind of world that emerges from this transformation will depend on our ability to recognize it as an opportunity.

You can be part of this grassroots, connected revolution. Join the Next Billion Network and come build with us a new kind of network.

Check out the Academic Program

See also AppLab links and their Community Knowledge Worker initiative.

7 Tips for an Authentic and Productive Writing Process

"Write the way you talk".
Sounds easy enough... More at Copyblogger

10 Great Apps for Remote Access

Just in case you're away from your desk... Article at Appstorm

People and their desks - a short film

Desk - Music and Sound Design from Aaron Trinder Film:Motion:Music on Vimeo.

Study of Global Online Behavior Finds Emerging Markets More Digitally Engaged

The largest ever global research project into people's online activities has released its findings.

Emerging markets are invariably on mobile platforms. What role does culture play in the number of 'friends' a user has? Japan the average is 23. By comparison, Malaysia average is 233. How many do you reckon the average NT Aboriginal would have if they took up the technology?

iPhone apps now more popular than major TV shows and sports broadcasts

A staggering metric, considering that Apple's App Store launched in July 2008. Full article at VentureBeat