If you don't engage in multiple back channels, you may not see multiple use cases. Different tools are best for different types of interaction. Just because post-it notes didn't work at WebWise doesn't mean they don't work in galleries... as we know from the success of many talkback boards.If you ask visitors/participants to try a new tool, make sure it has as low a barrier to entry as possible. I have yet to see a museum set something up that is as simple to use as Today'sMeet.If discussion is the goal, you don't need user profiles - you just need a way to talk. If building up a personal profile/relationship with the institution is a goal, people need to uniquely identify themselves.Think about the possibility for asynchronous back channels that allow visitors (and staff) to share deep content with each other over time. Consider, for example, the rich conversation on Flickr about this image from the Chicago World's Fair. You could imagine a comparable conversation available to visitors onsite alongside exhibits or artifacts in the galleries.If possible, find ways to show the real-time location of people who are engaging in the back channel. The Mattress Factory's new SCREENtxt application uses a location-based system so that visitors can identify whether other participants are onsite at the museum or not.Make allowance for emergent back channels that visitors/users "bring with them" to the experience. These tools are particularly valuable for the "portal to the world" back channel use case. Every time I see a kid take a cellphone photo in an exhibit, I know that photo will immediately travel to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc. How can your system capture that activity?
Shannon Smith on 04 Dec 08About Behold BeholdTM is a search engine for high-quality Flickr images. It aims to answer your queries based on what is inside the images -- at the pixel level. It offers a completely new way to search for images, using techniques of computer vision. It is different to standard image search engines, such as Flickr or Google, because those search through images using only image tags and filenames. Behold looks for high quality images, so you don't have to sift through hundreds of poorly taken pictures to find a good one. Behold uses both aesthetic and technical quality indicators to find some of the best images available online. Behold draws computational power from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to handle large volumes of images. Features Behold is capable of recognising a number of visual concepts in pictures. You can ask Behold to return images that look like one of these concepts. This new type of search can be flexibly combined with regular text-based search. For example you can ask Behold to return images tagged with the word 'london' that look like pictures of buildings (try it!). You can also filter text-based image search results based on what the images actually look like. Both of these features are demonstrated in these videos. With a newly introduced feature, Behold goes one step further and automatically suggests visual filters after analysing the words in your query. It shows you what your search results would look like if you apply one of these filters, so you save time on finding the right one.
Michele Brown on 15 Aug 13Search High Quality Flickr Images.
