Friday, December 31, 2010

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

Thursday, December 30, 2010

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?

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

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…

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Broadband to the bush

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

Monday, December 20, 2010

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?

Sunday, December 19, 2010

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.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

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

Friday, December 17, 2010

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

Thursday, December 16, 2010

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

Monday, December 13, 2010

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....

Friday, December 10, 2010

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

Thursday, December 9, 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.

Monday, December 6, 2010

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.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

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

Thursday, December 2, 2010

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

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

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'

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