New Media Initiatives Blog

There isn’t a decent web developer alive that doesn’t harbor a deep-seated hatred for Internet Explorer. For years we have dreamed about the day when we could cast off the shackles of developing for the users who are struck with a browser that predates web 2.0. We developers don’t know anyone who still uses IE6; if we did, we probably wouldn’t talk to them.

Word has recently come down of two major companies discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 6. First, it was noted that Apple’s MobileMe would work only in IE7 (and Safari and Firefox, of course). Now, 37signals has announced they are stopping support and testing for IE6 begining August 15:

The Internet Explorer 6 browser was released back in 2001, and Internet Explorer 7, the replacement, was released nearly two years ago in 2006. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it’s time to finally move beyond IE 6. [emphasis added]

We aren’t dropping support for IE6 on any Walker pages quite yet, it still makes up about 25% of our users on walkerart.org, but the day will come. That day, not too far from now, we’ll be able to declare our long developer emergency over. Bigger players like Apple and 37signals will help make that day sooner.

Yesterday was the deadline for submitting sign designs to My Yard Our Message. We got a ton of signs over the last few days, putting us just shy of 300 signs total. We’re very happy with that number, and the quality of some of the submissions.

This morning I turned the site off for a little while to turn the voting on. Voting is now running and as of this writing, there are already 1100 votes in the past hour and a half! To vote, we ask you to consider whether or not you’d put the given sign in your front yard.

The site is using the django-voting module to handle voting, but I’ve modified it a bit. Instead of digg or reddit-style voting, where a vote up counts for +1, and a vote down counts for +1, a vote down doesn’t negatively impact the vote count. This relates directly to the question, you deciding not to put the sign in your yard doesn’t cancel out someone else deciding to put it in their yard. In this sense, voting “no” doesn’t impact a sign, but it does allow a voter to know they’ve already made up their mind on the sign. But unlike the ballot box, voters can change their mind through the end of our voting period.

Additionally, the order of the signs on the site has been randomized in an attempt to give each sign a fair shake. Odds are signs that are closer to the front of the order may see more votes than those at the end, so the randomziation is unique for each user. The randomization that I see will not be the same as another user. Additionally, voters who view signs anonymously will see a different randomization each day. This is achieved by using each user’s ID for the random seed, or the day of the year for anonymous users.

While it would be great if anonymous users could vote, even with proper protections in place, it is possible the vote could be hijacked by someone with a lot of friends to vote for them. To prevent this, users are required to have an account to vote. We’ve made it really easy to create an account, all that’s needed is an email address. I’m still working on the verification mechanism, so users who sign up today or tomorrow won’t get a verification message from us until then. Giving an email address logs users in immediately, so they can vote right away, but if they don’t eventually verify the email address, we’ll remove their votes.

It’s Monday morning, and like many of you I’m sitting down to my computer for the day. I’ll check my email (office and GMail), see what’s new in the blogosphere (Google Reader), maybe catch up on the world a bit (Google News), and finally start my day of programming. (searching Google to see if anyone’s already written the code I’m working on ;)

You may notice a trend: Google. What would my world be like without Google? It’s an interesting thought experiment.

… except yesterday morning, it was a reality. Details are still sketchy (it may have just been Comcast?) but for an hour Sunday morning, I couldn’t reach a single Google domain. No GMail, no RSS, no search. And, in a creepy side effect I hadn’t anticipated, MANY sites were either slow, broken, or eternally loading as my browser tried in vain to pull the Google Analytics or Adsense code for the page. In short, the Internet was Broken.

It was amazing to watch myself try to remember how to search without Google. Maybe… Yahoo? No, I’ll try Ask.com. Turns out the results are terrible, at least for programming-related searches. A friend called looking for directions to a farmers’ market, and it took me a bit to remember the world beyond Google Maps. Doesn’t… Microsoft do maps? Hmm, who else… If only I could search!!

Twitter was still up, and via TwitScoop.com I could see a big spike in Google-related tweets, but I have yet to see any official word on this. Clearly big companies have downtime (Amazon was down for a few hours recently), but still… It may be time to rethink my utter dependency on “The Google”.

Last night was the big SubZero street festival portion of Zero1. South First Street was closed for about four blocks in the SoFA district of San Jose, and many artists showing off their contraptions and work had set up. I took a walk down the street several times and captured some of the work.

Graffiti Research Lab was visibly present, both with some of their work on display on the street and in the Anno Domani gallery, with a show called “The U.S. Department of Homeland Graffiti Liquidation Sale”. Some of the work was a spoof on the LED sign scare in Boston a year ago, in which GRL was quickly and wrongly implicated. So nice to see Osama Bin Laden and George W Bush giving each other the finger in LED style.

Inside the gallery DJ Spooky (aka Paul D Miller) gave a talk about his new book and remix culture. He manages to connect the dots between many the history of the remix and how embedded it has become into our culture. I didn’t stick around to buy the book, though I plan to soon, because I was headed down to MACLA for a performance of Flock.

Upon entering the performance space for Flock, you’re given a black hat with a glowing white orb on the top and told to walk up to the stage. Just above the stage, there is a projection visualizing all the orbs on-screen, and with enough distinguishing movement, you can figure out which dot represents your orb. After a bit of play, the real performance begins. Four musicians playing saxophones eventually made the way on stage, each outfitted with an iPaq connected to a WiFi network, transmitting an ever-changing score of what they should be playing. Three dancers with white orbs eventually emerged, and began moving around the stage area. Their orbs combined with the movement of the musician’s orbs changed the score dynamically. Over the course of the show the method of generating music changed, from a simple cross-screen wipe, to something akin to radar, and also a connect-the-dots style graph. The audience was pulled in one at a time by the dancers through the performance as well, and were instructed to move around and generate the sound. At one point a conga line formed, and at another several people grabbed hands and began circling one of the musicians, overloading him with notes to play. In this way, the social interaction people engaged in to generate the music was more interesting than the music itself.

There were also low-rider art bikes on display. The display was no Minneapolis Art Car Parade, but still fun to see the weird things people do to their cars. The bikes in particular looked very slick. I’m afraid if I had a bike that nice, I’d never ride it.

Another performance on the street that always had a crowed was Drone Machines, operated by “Author & Punisher” Tristan Shone, consisting of several very industrial looking contraptions that as the description notes, “require significant physical interaction from the performer” to operate:

Minneapolis Art on Wheels has also been around the festival, but they were out in force last night at SubZero, at several different locations down First street and side streets. They even had one of MAW’s bikes rigged up with GRL’s L.A.S.E.R. Tag system and a crowd gathered around watching and waiting to tag. Everyone had a good laugh when a squad car drove by with an officer glared out the window at us.

I missed the first day of Zero1 due to an flight scheduling snafu that was totally my fault. From the reports I’ve read and the people I’ve talked with, it sounds like I missed out on some cool stuff. That said, I did make it to San Jose early yesterday morning and visited a few of the exhibitions. Rhizome already has some great coverage so I am not going to duplicate their thoughts.

Having not read much before visiting, I was expecting the exhibition to be very much in the realm of new media and digital technology as the primary focus. The show straddles the fence between technology as a driving factor in the creation of work, vs digital technology as the being only an enabling factor in much of the work. Its a good balance that seems to accurately represent the way many new media artists think; they dabble in many forms.

I would best describe Tantalum Memorial by Harwood, Richard Wright, Matsuko Yokokoji as a monument to retro computing, but it’s meaning makes it more solemn and morbid. It consists of several strowger switches, which a computer dials into and plays back recorded messages from London’s Congolese community’s circulating conversations. Strowger switches were the mechanical devices invented by Almon Strowger to replace human telephone operators. Strowger switches use Tantalum, as do many modern day electronics, including cell phones. Tantalum is mined in Congo, and is the source of considerable strife there, causing the deaths of many thousands in wars relatively underreported in western media. You can listen to the recording on a set of headphones. The sound of the switches echos through the gallery as if counting the rising death toll.

Global warming and climate change are themes that loom large in this exhibit and Zero1 in general. Rising North by Jane Marsching and the two other works by her address global warming more directly than perhaps any other work in the festival I’ve seen so far. The work consists of a almost sci-fi video showing the sea levels around the world rising, the mega-cities of the world shrinking and eventually being encased in some sort of biosphere and floatation device. The encased cities then move and converge at the north and south polls, the places on earth that will remain suitable for human habitation when much of the temperate zones become too warm. Watching the work, I can’t help but be both fascinated by the idea of moving entire land-masses and horrified that rising sea levels and temperatures is a future we are destined to see.

Ways to Wave is a virtual and physical sculpture; it exists both in the gallery and in a different form in Second Life. Participants in the gallery move the petals of the flower-like interface in the gallery, which effects a scene in Second Life projected on the screen just behind the sculpture. The movement of the petals also impacts a changing audio composition. There is supposed to be a way to visit the sculpture in Second Life, but I haven’t attempted that. It is an interesting way to bridge the physical and the virtual, and I’m always a big fan of work that encourages you to interact with it.

If/Then is Piotr Szyhalski's contribution to the exhibition and the festival. Installed in the gallery and in changing locations around the festival are dispensers that drop leaflets designed by Szyhalski. The leaflets reference leaflets distributed by the US Military's Psyops department in the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Visitors are encouraged to take some leaflets of leaflets that drop onto the gallery floor. The set of leaflets I received have the text "Honor will never be regained, no matter what the cost", printed in both arabic and english on the back, with pictures of Saddam Hussein and Thomas Jefferson on the front. The dual meanings of this are disturbing if unavoidable; Saddam Hussein will be remembered by many as a disgraced dictator, and the US has lost much of it's honor and credibility in the world because of the war our government started in Iraq.

I’ve got a few more posts in store about the festival, so stay tuned.

I’ve just made a minor tweak to My Yard Our Message. You can now download the full resolution jpeg file for each sign as well as embed the signs into another page or blog, just like I am doing here.

All the signs for My Yard Our Message must be licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike License to be submitted to the project, so we are obligated to make the files available to all. They always were, but not easily accessible. Now we’ve got a link right there under each sign for the file.

For the embed, I’m using an iframe which is certainly the easiest method to getting a nicely formatted widget on the page, because it avoids any CSS inheritance problems that a Javascript and document.write solution might have. The downside is that it is not always compatible with every blogging or HTML authoring solution out there, due to the way some have a tendency to filter HTML. Regardless, it is good enough to satisfy most user’s needs.

University of Minnesota professor Ali Momeni and his students are on their way to San Jose’s Zero1 Festival later this week with their mobile projection units. The mobile projection units are GRL-inspired work bikes equipped with a computer, projector, generator and all other necessary gear for outdoor projection mayhem, which will be used during The UnConvention. The group has set up a new blog, Minneapolis Art on Wheels, to document the exploits of the trip. They’ve loaded up the bikes into a cargo van and are caravanning across the western United States.

Before he left, Momeni told me he was curious to see if they could project onto the face of Mt. Rushmore. I’m not sure if they’ll pull it off, but the latest updates from the Badlands are pretty close; pure projection geek porn.

I’m heading out to Zero1 later this week and will be blogging about the festival and hope to meet up with Momeni and his students for some fun in San Jose.

Tuesday I posted some of the technical details for My Yard Our Message. Since then, I’ve been working on putting together a Facebook App to let people show the signs on their profiles. It is done, or done enough to be used.

I’ve played around with building a Facebook app before, but never had a clear strategic need to build one. I found this tutorial very helpful on getting my feet wet. For the moment, the app is written and PHP and talks to the actual My Yard Our Message site via json, rather than rss.

One of the things I am evaluating is whether or not I can set up a system to let people vote on signs directly from Facebook. Obviously, this would tremendously expand our pool of eligible voters, and would eliminate the need to force people to register for an account just to vote. During the building of the app, I went back and forth on the necessity of registration to vote, but ultimately decided it was necessary and laid the structural groundwork. However, I think I can get enough information about Facebook users to know they’re unique, track them, and prevent them from voting more than once.

This would require re-writing the Facebook app at that point, most likely in python and django for closer integration with the authentication and verification processing. There is some initial work done on a Facebook client API for python and django that looks promising as well.

Aside about Facebook pages
I’ve always been frustrated with Facebook apps that don’t work on Pages (as opposed to Profiles). After building an app, I have a new found appreciation for the applications that don’t work. Getting an app to work with pages isn’t really that hard, but it sure is confusing, mostly because of the lack of documentation. The only real documentation is a chat log in the Facebook developer wiki (no, I am not making this up):

(03:02:02 AM) swombat: ok, so basically, "Facebook pages is all transparent uses fbml blah blah blah"
                       "Oh but btw you need to build a completely different piece of code to handle this new type of user"
(03:02:18 AM) swombat: (not angry at you btw :-P)
(03:02:43 AM) fiveofoh: Yeah pretty much
(03:02:46 AM) swombat: this sounds really quite tedious and error-prone though
(03:02:50 AM) fiveofoh: Yeah it does
(03:02:56 AM) fiveofoh: Which is why I haven't done it on my app yet :P

So instead of just this:

$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('‘, $user);
$facebook->api_client->fbml_refreshRefUrl($process_url);

you use this:

if (isset($_GET['fb_page_id'])){
	$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('‘, $_GET[’fb_page_id’]);
} else {
	$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML(’‘, $user);
}
$facebook->api_client->fbml_refreshRefUrl($process_url);

Where $process_url is the page that spits out the markup to be shown on Facebook.

Time to return the favor to the blogosphere and the mplayer-users mailing list, where most of this information was painstakingly discovered. I’m working on a phase of the new ArtsConnectEd site where we’re trying to automate the importing of all of our various media types into two standard, embeddable formats: mp3 and flv. The source media is in everything from Real Audio and Real Video to different flavors of quicktime (mp4, etc), old mp3 codecs, some avi, and even wav files. We also need to generate thumbnails for all the video, and properly detect the edge cases where we have an audio-only quicktime file that wants to be a video but clearly should actually be an mp3 audio file.

The solution is ffmpeg and mplayer / mencoder, and the amazing thing is it’s almost as easy as just throwing a file at it and telling it what format you want. The developers of these tools have done a truly amazing job.

Things get much trickier when you introduce Real Media into the mix. An unfortunate number of our Channel videos are in this format, so it’s something we have to solve. After many attempts and failed encodings - including one hair-pulling episode where it turned out the audio was actually out of sync in the original file and not in the transformed version - I believe I have a “good enough for now” command line formula for converting Real Media to flv. (ffmpeg actually can’t handle .rm files, so this is all done in mencoder)

mencoder realmediafile.rm -ni -o flvoutput.flv -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=56 -srate 22050 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=300:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 -fps 30.000 -ofps 24 -mc 1 -of lavf -lavfopts i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames

Some of that is over my head and I just copied it (last_pred=3??) but the real key for this process seems to be knowing and accurately setting the input stream’s framerate using -fps xx.xx. Without that, the real demuxer will sometimes guess wrong and get out of sync, resulting in an unpleasant hung process as it comes across the next data chunk. I only noticed this happening with RV40 on multirate files, RV30 seemed solid. You can pull the info about the stream, including framerate and original dimensions, using mplayer:

mplayer -identify -frames 0 -vc null -vo null -ao null realmediafile.rm

Even cooler, in the cases where the .rm file isn’t local, both of those commands work by feeding them a stream like rtsp://server/realmediafile.rm!

With any luck, someone will find this page and save themselves a day of frustration. Or someone will find this page and notice I’m doing something wrong and correct me!

Last week we officially launched the My Yard Our Message project. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it is a project we’re running over the summer, leading up the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this September. We’re asking people to design yard signs and vote for the best signs. In August, we’ll print the most-voted signs and place them in a few places in the Twin Cities. You’ll also be able to order signs of your own online for $20.

Building the site
The site is built using django, an open source web framework similar to Ruby on Rails (except neater). While the site is a project of mnartists, there was not a need to integrate it with that site and it’s more legacy java codebase. In considering how to build the site, I first considered WordPress. I am a pretty good WordPress hacker, the needs for the project (accounts, file upload, voting) didn’t seem suited for a hack of WordPress. The project seemed like a textbook perfect case for using a modern web framework, rather than shoehorning it into an existing content management system.

Even though I know a good bit of php, I wasn’t really excited about learning the CodeIgniter or Symphony frameworks. Nate is a big Symphony fan, and a friend is a CodeIgniter user. I like that PHP is ubiquitous and freely available on just about every web host, but every time I write PHP I can’t help but feel like I’m writing Visual Basic.

Ruby On Rails also seemed promising, but hosting for RoR is neither cheap nor often as reliable as I would like. Hosting it in a shared environment seemed a little scary. Looking at the syntax for the language, it seemed a little foreign, too.

The power of python
I have been attracted to python for a while, especially after listening to Guido Van Rossum, python’s creator, on FLOSS Weekly over a year ago. Here are the high points of python’s beauty:

• Clean formatting: Python denotes blocks of code with indentation, rather than curly braces or parentheses. This might seem a little weird, but after maintaining lots of messy javascript and php, it is a blessing. If you don’t have your code indented properly, it doesn’t work.
• Forgiving where it needs to be: Despite python’s strictness with indentation, it’s forgiving with other things, like commas in lists or objects. With javascript, if you have a comma after the last item in an object, some browsers will freak out:

  { item, item, item, }

  Python doesn’t care, because it understands that it makes sense to have the trailing comma. You just might want to add another item later.

• Verbosity: While python is not as verbose as AppleScript or Lingo, it is pretty descriptive. Coupled with the great formatting, it makes for very maintainable and readable code.
• The command line interpreter: PHP and javascript technically have interpreters, but python’s is very integrated into the way the language is used and taught. In most tutorials, the interpreter is used to experiment and rapidly show the way some code works. This encourages you to try ideas quickly and make your mistakes early, so you know the code you put in your app does what you expect.
• Libraries: Python has a huge assortment of libraries, but almost none of them are included by default. This is both a blessing and a curse. It means that you only import what you need, but if you need a lot, a big list of imports can seem unwieldy.
• Python performs, and is cross platform. Google uses python all over the place for glue, and it is known to perform very well. Mod_python is mature, and works easily with apache. Python also runs pretty much anywhere, there are easy installers for every major platform.

Developing with django

Django build’s on python’s goodness and uses it to make a very capable web framework. Here are some overall observations about django:

• Django is built into Google App Engine. Had I gotten a developer key in time, I probably would have built the site using App Engine. But the fact that google chose django gives me a sense that their smarty-pants engineers think it’s well put together.
• Django has a kick-butt admin system. You define your database models and with one or two lines of code, set up the way the admin works. It’s like scaffolding, except easier to use and understand.
• Django isn’t “done” yet. The current release of django is 0.96.2, but if you look around the developer lists a bit, everyone will tell you to use the development pre-0.97-svn version. There are still a lot of things to be done before 1.0 hits, and some of them are non-minor architectural changes. This also has implications for documentation. You’ll find lots of blog posts that refer to solving problems older versions of django. Often times, though, these errors have been fixed in the development version.
• File uploads are great, file uploads suck! Django is a bit memory hungry when dealing with file uploads (as MYOM does). There is a patch available to fix the way it saves files and to allow for progressive uploading, but I haven’t tried it yet. On the other hand, if you need to deal with small files and aren’t too worried about memory, it is very easy to set up forms to deal with uploaded files.
• The template system is wonderful. Its exactly what a template language should be. Powerful enough to do almost everything, limiting enough that it’s not a full-fledged programming language. You can’t write python in your template, but you can do simple tasks like iteration and flow control. It forces you to keep your fancier logic in the models or the views.
• There’s a lot of built-in support for things you often want to do (the point of a framework, after all). There’s also a large library of apps for commons tasks. We will be using django-voting in MYOM when we being voting in July.
• Developing is easy, thanks to the built-in webserver. Once you have django installed, setting up an project and app is only a few lines of code. The built-in webserver makes debugging easy. It can be a little tricky to figure out deployment, especially since the production sever is usually apache + mod_python, different than the development server. The thing to remember here is assert False.

Two resources I have found quite useful in developing the site are the Django Book (free) and Learning Website Development with Django.

The site is still in development. We still have over a month to figure out and implement voting, and a month more to implement the ordering process. Voting is not going to be overly complicated, thanks to django-voting. We are using Cafepress to print the signs, and they are very high quality. Cafepress offers an API for developers to integrate with. We’re not entirely sure yet if we’re going to go that route or simply manually enter all the signs into our store.

I hope to post more about django and this project in the future.

One of the other things I do besides making websites is teaching other people how to make them. For the past three semesters, I have been adjunct faculty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, teaching an online class called “portfolio.net”.

Teaching via bulletin board, instant messenger, screencast, and email can be a frustrating experience for all involved and requires a bit of dedication on the part of my students that might not need to be there if you were taking a class in person. A downside: it might take a few email exchanges to understand and explain a problem. An upside: You can “go to class” from anywhere, wearing pretty much anything. I usually graded student work from my favorite cafe. The person who used to teach this class lived in South Africa.

The main emphasis of the class is producing a web portfolio, which is the final project. But beyond just the portfolio, the class tries to teach some of the real mechanics of the web. Students learn HTML, CSS and get a little basic javascript. I am a firm believer in hand coding (as is any decent web designer), and tools like Dreamweaver or iWeb are not easy to teach over the internet. Plus, the web is a place of democracy, and using expensive tools to build code that is easier made with a free text editor doesn’t seem in the spirit of the web. By learning the basic building blocks, it’s my hope that students will be well prepared to actually maintain their sites down the road. While they might loose access to dreamweaver when they graduate or Adobe changes/discontinues it, the HTML of the site will look the same in any text editor.

Now that the semester is over, I thought I would share my student’s work and get them a little exposure and google-fu on the rest of the web. As you can see, my students are were mix of illustrators, photographers and fine artists:

• Meaghan Beninati
• Lucy Swerdfeger
• Casey Cebulski
• Katie Parke-Reimer
• Rebecca Moffatt
• Mary Lucic
• Hilary Reeves
• Kelley Meister
• Tristan Thiel
• Sean Lynch
• Ryan Fogarty
• Karlisha Gray

• Over at the University, Ali Momeni’s Art for the People is becoming more active with their Art on Wheels project. From what I read in the blogs, the bikes are mostly built and the students are making more outings. There are some newer videos, but this is probably the best overview video, made back when the GRL folks were in town. I can’t wait to see more action with these bikes over the summer and during the RNC.
• Our friends over at the Brooklyn Musuem are been running a sweet little project called Click!, “a crowd curated exhibition”. Here’s the deal: people submit their photos that are about the changing face of Brooklyn, visitors like you and me vote on them, and then the top rated photos are put in an exhibition in the Museum. The submission part of the project is closed, but you can still sign up and vote for three more weeks. I’m usually pretty skeptical of sites that depend on user generated content, but it seems the enticement of getting work in the museum is a strong motivator. We learned this with the Worlds Away video project. And it is actually pretty fun to log in and see what has been submitted, to see the range of work by artists that are unknown. For someone that hasn’t been around Brooklyn much, it is a unique way to explore.

  Shelley warned me that the interface is limiting, but it seems to me the limits are perfect for the scope of the project. Plus, they’re also using mootools, which I know and love. Nina Simon has a great article on the project which you should read if you haven’t yet.

• Two posts about the internet and culture that do some hard thinking for you and make you think: The New Social Circulation: Frontline, Out of Print, and the XO Laptop Photo and Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.
• The most amazingly non-akward akward TV spots ever, featuring local circuit benders Beatrix*JAR, who are participating in a Workshop here at the Walker this summer. The duo is also participating in Bent Fest happening this weekend in the Twin Cities.
• The true power of the internet: Helen Thomas asks a tough question about Torture when no other journalist does. The internet is happy with Helen and wants to make a point to the other white house journalists. What to they do? Send her $1000 worth of flowers.

Some great conversation happening in the comments of my writeup of the Search session at MW2008, and it made me remember something I wanted to bring up at the conference but forgot. Namely, the concept of “master metadata”, or the idea that there’s one authoritative version of the metadata describing an object.

This came up for me in the session the MFA and MIT did on sharing their data for a new subsite: they mentioned the data was being “augmented” on the final site, and that someday they’d be interested in getting this extra information back into their main repository.

The problem’s immediately obvious: with all of the proposed sharing and opening up of our data, presumably to allow others to weigh in on it and add their voice, there are often situations where institutions would like to have some of this new data. For instance, we’re building a new version of ArtsConnectEd and intend to allow museum educators to variously tag, comment on, and draw relationships between objects. This will almost certainly be “good data”, stuff that would be valuable to integrate in our internal collection database.

The question is, how? Once your data is available for sharing, and someone actually builds something good with it and enhances it, is there a way to get that new data back into the source? Is there / should there be a way to tag metadata as “original source” or “augmented”? Should we be asking anyone harvesting our data to push back their changes for us to audit and possibly include?

Anyone solved this? Seb, are you getting info back from Flickr Commons you can then add to your internal database? Phil / Jenna, any thoughts on how to get that extra data back?

This session has been great for me, as this is very much where my head is at right now with ArtsConnectEd… My live notes follow:

Brian Kelly chairs a session on Search, announcing that with the smaller size both speakers are willing to make this a bit more workshop-like. Terry Makewell starts by introducing his project: 9 partners making up the National Museums Online Learning Project. He goes over some of the goals of the project, and the current state of things, and the realization that some sort of federated search was needed to span the partners’ collections.

How to do the federated search? Multi-institution project meant different technical teams, different technologies, and limited resources in some cases. See the paper for more details, but the two technologies they considered most carefully are OAI/PMH and Opensearch.

OAI, the path we’re going down with ArtsConnectEd, uses a central repository and runs the searches there. Opensearch spools the searches out to each institution and then re-orders them locally and returns the result.

Opensearch fit the project requirements and timeline most efficiently, so that was their choice. He discusses their prototyping effort: scraping search results to generate the RSS for Opensearch. They now have a single page with a configuration file they can drop on each partners’ website and it will “just work”. Potential caveats: what if the search result page changes? Also the Opensearch can only be as fast as the response from the slowest partner.

He shows the working prototype, and I’m excited to see they’ve got thumbnails where available - their scraper must be fairly robust for each partner.

Lessons learned: federated search doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated, and it can work with small and large museums equally well. Their method pushes the work offsite, requiring minimal or no effort on the museum’s part.

(Note to self: end slide show with a kitten and you’re in.)

Q&A - Scalibility issues come up, they’re aware of them coming. Asked if they considered Google Co-Op: yes, but quickly found that Google was unable to deeply crawl many of the partners’ collections due to dynamic urls. Lots of twitter traffic in this session too.

Very interesting debate for me to hear on OAI vs. Opensearch. Many institutions moving towards OAI, but the scope of implementing it is a barrier for most. My feeling that OAI gives more searchable fields is somewhat refuted by the idea that the average user has no interest or knowledge of these fields (culture, era, etc)…

(Mike Ellis shows off by building a co-op search during the session.)

Johan Møhlenfeldt Jensen from the Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark, speaks next on his paper. Trying to catch up, I was distracted for the beginning.

The example he’s showing now exposes some fields for filtering, rather than just keywords. Interesting. Another example showing map-based searching, says it’s immensely popular. Easy to make for photographic collections since the address is known, much harder for other sorts of objects sometimes.

Interesting discussion on “advanced search” - he says studies show it’s minimally used, Google has changed everything. People just want a single field. Hmm… Are we wasting time and overbuilding if we have anything more advanced than a single field?? This is the question I’m banging against as I listen to these speakers.

He asks “is the best the enemy of the good?” Good question. Do we wait forever getting it right? Clearly, no, but how far do we go.

They both have good input on the question I ask about overbuilding: move the advanced search behind the scenes and make it more semantic. Still need the metadata, but don’t ask users to know about it. Also need a way to drill down after search: start with simple search, and then apply filters.

Very good comment on positioning: where and at what point in the process do you expose filters and result counts?

Brian summarizes the importance of getting static URIs for resources: then Google will “just work”…

(Note to self: implement Opensearch for the Walker and ACE)

This session, lead by Sebastian Chan of the Powerhouse Museum was packed to the brim, and well worth it. Seb gave a great overview of Google Analytics, as well as other stats tools and talked a bit about how to use them to create a big picture of visitor analysis. My notes are not very organized, but might prove useful for some.

The Search “Problem”
Google deep links.
Now google has search inside this site right there on front of results page, when you hit a high ranked site right away (search for Powerhouse museum). Not doing this to the Walker Yet.
Google hi-jacks these search results, shows ads, can hurt.
When someone enters from a deep link off google, hard to gauge intention from visitors.
Funny, jobs seems to be a top result on many museum sites.
Retailers hate this, they want to funnel your experience through all their ads. (Amazon wants to try to sell to you at all points, google thwarts this)

Traditional Metrics
Come out of the advertising world
visits, pageviews, time on site, etc

Ask people what they’re using
Almost everyone is using some sort of javascript based client side solution

Look at google analytics
13k visits, if were using a logfile based solution, would be vastly inflated by bots, spiders, harvesters
Javascript tagging solution resolves some of this
When switching to a logfile based solution, with inflated numbers, going to tagging solution, hard to explain big drop to the marketing department or the director

Benchmarking tool in google analytics. Interesting, haven’t looked at this before.

Demo of how unique visitor counting works.

Time on site: Seb showing a site with time on-site of 0:54 seconds. Break it out, 23K of visitors show a time on site of 0-10 seconds.

How many visitors have a depth of visit (Number of pages visited) of 1 page. Tons! Every visitor that hits only 1 page, they count as 0 seconds.

If you deduct the people that only hit one page (getting rid of 0 sec visits), you see that the median time on site visits are much better.

Looking at content drilldown, now looking at comparing regions and how to use drilldown.

Site search overview. Google can track search terms on your site, whether or not you’re using a google search on your site.

Traditional Metrics.
RSS feeds are not hit in GA, but can in logfile analysis. But problematic, because RSS hits are not really visits.

Email metrics
Useful to gather addresses of those who read email, take those addresses, and use them as seperate sub-group that are receptive.
Do the same, with those who clicked through, can drill down to specific exhibitions, etc. Allows very direct marketing to receptive people.

Realtime Metrics
Reinvigorate. My buddy paul loves this. Lets you see see visits in real time, what they’re searching for, etc…
Looks like tons of traffic from google. Wow!
Lets you expand visits, etc. Really slick.
Lets you pick up trends very quickly.

Outside metrics
Quote from Seb: “You’ve heard of Alex? Alexa is crap. Don’t use it.”
Instead, use AttentionMeter. But, it’s US only. Free!
Works that ISPs sell anonymozed logs, attentionmeter uses that for data.
Looks pretty nice.
Quantcast lets you look up similar sites, how you compare, etc.
Compete.com is another one worth looking at. Compete is better than Quantcast, according to Seb.

New Metrics
Flickr Metrics
For powerhouse, metric is not views, but how many things were tagged. Part of their goal with flickr commons, getting people to tag stuff.

Technorati Authority: Dubious, not all that great. Only measure blog links.

egoSurf.com: lets you check the “ego score” of a person and/or a site. Neat.

Domaintools: Lets you look up how much you’re being used as a reference in Wikipedia, amongst other things.
http://whois.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/walkerart.org

Side notes:
Tabbed browsing messes with things. if you open a tab, how accurate is it when you open a new tab and come back to it later? Not very accurate.

Question I asked about RSS Metrics:
Look at people who are nerds.
Captures a lot of machines, too.
Best metric is people who use feed my inbox.

Edit: Also some great notes here.