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It's been a good year for Twitter, and not merely because the company announced yesterday it has secured another huge round of funding. The microblogging platform has grown by over 100 million users this year and expanded its staff from 130 to 350 people. And it's rolled out major redesigns and improvements to its site, mobile apps and APIs.

Cultural Heritage and the Semantic Web British Museum & UCL Study Day - Jan 13th The World Wide Web is an essential part of the Museum's toolkit for publishing information, engaging visitors and communicating across the globe. However, museum web sites and information systems are still largely silos that make it difficult for us to realize the benefits of bringing data together. The growing momentum of the Semantic Web movement means a greater investment in the technology and tools needed to convert its potential into practical opportunities that museums can utilise. Und: "A museum object is more like an illustration, or witness of the past, than information in its own right. Cultural historical research means understanding 'possible pasts', the facts, events, material, social and psychological influences and motivations. It lives from understanding contexts, by pulling together bits and pieces of related facts from disparate resources, which can typically not be classified under subjects in an obvious way. It lives from taking into account all known facts." 

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act, about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. Authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard pack a lot into 40 pages--an argument for the rise of active arts engagement, a framework for thinking about ways to actively involve audiences, and lots of case studies. It is framed as a kind of study guide; pop-outs provide questions that tease out opportunities and tensions in the narrative. This report is not an end-all; it is the opening for a conversation.

"We need a blog!".  The boss needs to be able to cover their trail, so they require a strategy to go along with it.  The team creates a strategy full of love and happiness, the boss has no clue what it means and three (3) days later…violla!  The blog is in place.

On April 25, 2007 the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto launched a new online initiative called Collection X "This project, which has been in development for six years, represents a huge leap forward for the AGO not only because it makes works from the permanent collection available online but also because it makes it possible for the public to upload their own collections and to create exhibitions using the same application. As it has been conceived, Collection X is meant to function as an open-source museum that features public collections presented alongside collections created by the public." (museumsremixed.blogspot)

Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. (Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy "migration utility" through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.)

A research shows that most people actually don't rate supportive technology very high when it comes to museum visits. However, the comment section is quite interesting as it shows that this also depends very much on the type of museum. Art museums for example do have a comparably high acceptance of technology (about one third)

Social Tagging-Projekt aus D.: Was machen wir, um diese Reproduktionen wiederzufinden, und zwar möglichst nach den unterschiedlichsten Kritereien geordnet? Manchmal wollen wir Bilder finden, die einen spezifischen Inhalt oder eine spezifische Form haben. Da die Möglichkeiten, über den Computer direkt auf die Reproduktion zuzugreifen, noch sehr beschränkt sind, vergeben wir Schlagworte, sogenannte Metadaten. Das ist ein sehr zeitraubendes Geschäft und kann am besten von einer großen Anzahl von Mitarbeiter/innen übernommen werden. Um diesen Beitrag bitten wir Sie mit diesem Spiel. ... Der zugrundeliegende Bilderbestand wird der Datenbank Artemis entnommen, die am Institut für Kunstgeschichte der LMU München in Zusammenarbeit mit der IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften der Universität aufgebaut wurde und die inzwischen mehr als 25.000 Bilder enthält. Diese Version von ARTigo basiert auf einem führend von Dr. Gerhard Schön von der IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften entwickelten Spiel. ... Die Idee für dieses Projekt stammt von Prof. Dr. Hubertus Kohle nach einem Gespräch mit Prof. Dr. François Bry über „Games with a Purpose".

"Its short history is this: I worked on it for several years, acquired a high-powered agent, had some brushes with major publishers, then, crickets. Way back when, say, a dozen years ago, a single editor could acquire a book, but today a whole board is usually required to sign off on a project, especially when a big advance is involved. Worse yet, the traditional book-publishing business has fallen on hard times, with layoffs and news that vaunted old publishers such as Houghton Mifflin have literally put the freeze on acquisitions. In short, it's ugly out there, particularly for new fiction writers. "

HERE IS NEW YORK is not a conventional gallery show. It is something new, a show tailored to the nature of the event, and to the response it has elicited. The exhibition is subtitled "A Democracy of Photographs" because anyone and everyone who has taken pictures relating to the tragedy was invited to submit their images to the gallery, where they were digitally scanned, printed and displayed on the walls alongside the work of top photojournalists and other professional photographers.

Fundraising2.0_: Kickstarter rules means the money has to be raised within the timeframe or it doesn't get any of it, so please reach deep and throw a few dollars into pot. There are also rewards for certain donations, so go have a look.

Kickstarter rules means the money has to be raised within the timeframe or it doesn't get any of it, so please reach deep and throw a few dollars into pot. There are also rewards for certain donations, so go have a look.

The main aim of the study was to analyse the 2.0 environment, which had been set up six months before, and put forward actions to improve it. > Of all the networks analysed, the blog is the key: it serves as a tool for dissemination, a discussion space and a means of creating content.

"CollectiveAccess is a highly configurable cataloguing tool and web-based application for museums, archives and digital collections. Available free of charge under the GPL open-source license, it requires little to no custom programming to support a variety of metadata standards, external data sources and repositories, as well as most popular media formats. In addition to multilingual cataloguing facilities, it allows publication of this data in the languages of your choice. "

Know YOUR story and tell it with authenticity Listen to the stories of others Listen to the story the data is telling you Narrative is important - but it does not trump action!

"Sente 6 is the next-generation academic reference manager. Sente helps you find, organize, review and cite the academic literature in your field, and it does it in ways that you have probably not thought possible before. Sente also helps you build and maintain your library of PDF files for these references, because having ready access to the full text of important articles can be critical. Sente also excels at properly formatting bibliographies in your papers, but you probably already knew that. "

The Animal Bytes project at the Museum of Zoology is capturing stories of the Museum and responses to its collections from staff and visitors of all kinds.

Diskussion Museum Computer Group: User generated / crowd-sourced geotagging? I'll just give one practical example..  Take an image such as one of the Normandy landings from the Imperial War Museum - http://bit.ly/cIr4zG.  The description tells us it was taken in Villers-Bocage.  I could then (or perhaps even an automated tool could) generate tags that put it in that locality.  And then someone who lives or visits there should be able to track it down pretty easily.  In fact people have done such things - see http://virtualfunzone.com/normandy-1944-then-and-now.html - but for all their effort, without that relatively small step that such a tool would have facilitated nothing has gone back to the original images.  Without that an opportunity of providing an enhanced experience, whether through a web tool like HistoryPin or via a mobile based AR app, is lost.

"A recently launched service in Germany called PaperC (Twitter: @Paper_c) looks like it might become a pretty handy resource for students and researchers. It is an online library of commonly used textbooks for studying. You can read all of them online for free, but you can also download PDFs, make notes and bookmarks, and copy and paste quotes. The latter functions cost something, but not much. A PDF of 10 pages costs 1 Euro. The idea is not that it replaces books, as such, but replaces the photocopier. So far they have 2,799 books in their library."

Launched in March 2010, Object Stories invites visitors to record their own narratives about personal objects-whether a piece of clothing, a cherished record album, or a family heirloom.  By capturing, honoring, and sharing participants' stories, this project aims to demystify the Museum, making it more accessible, welcoming, and meaningful to a greater diversity of communities - while continuing to highlight the inherent relationship between people and things.  Nearly one thousand people from throughout Portland-most of who had never before set foot in the Museum-have participated as storytellers in this project.

Following on from the success of award-winning app Streetmuseum™, the Museum of London has joined forces with AETN UK's flagship channel HISTORY™ to develop a new app which gives users the opportunity to see Roman London as it was 2,000 years ago