Links for 4 November 2012

I finally got round to listening to James Burke’s excellent talk by from dConstruct. Definitely give that a listen, it’s the most thought-provoking thing I’ve listened to in a while and is entertaining too. Not that you’d know that from the title and description.

I usually like to start these posts off with something pretty, so check you the Waterfall Swing – Dash 7 – Riders pass through openings in a waterfall created by precisely monitoring their path via axel-housed encoders, creating the thrill of narrowly escaping obstacles

Arts/digital links

I like this quote from an article in France Today called The Louvre Goes Digital:

Indeed, with virtual visits available online, does the Louvre risk losing admission fees? “It’s like saying a website showing gorgeous beaches will cause people to stop swimming in the Caribbean,” laughs Alfandari.

Econsultancy gushed over the Tate website the other day, with mentions for the Royal Academy and National Portrait Gallery websites too.

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is reopening next year but this week the Rijksstudio was launched, offering 125,000 artworks online and allowing visitors to do all sorts of things with them. It’s a genuinely very interesting thing. Also this week, Artfinder relaunched as a rather more straightforward shop.

The Museum Digital Publishing Bliki aspires to be a resource to keep track of the evolving options and issues faced by museums and their publishing partners as they develop and execute digital publishing strategies. Which sounds like a good thing.

Scottish Ballet have made a fitness video for YouTube (article about it here). It’s an interesting idea – fitness videos are very YouTube-friendly and they’ve clearly got the expertise. I daresay, if they had a mind to (and with a few tweaks), they could build this into a decent series.

  • Quite a nice Twitter campaign to save Metropole Orchestra using a piano interface to make musical tweets.
  • Omeka is a free and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. The idea being that you can launch an online exhibition as easily as a blog.
  • Job ads are always interesting. This one says that MoMA are after a Head of Digital and that they want to create a monetised online museum and membership.
  • ARART describes itself as “an application that breathes life into objects”. See the video for the kind of thing it does, although something in me says that augmenting masterpieces in that way isn’t really on.
  • The final Digital Transformations report has been published.
  • Google Cultural Institute launched 42 online exhibits covering major events in the 20th and 21st centuries, working with 17 different institutions around the world.

Other links

Some people from Threadless are running Obama’s digital team. Last time round there were all sorts of interesting digital things to take from the winning campaign and this is a look at how things are done four years on. I wonder what kind of things they can’t talk about.

Journalism.co.uk spoke to NME.com’s Luke Lewis about how they use their community of readers to influence editorial. Luke’s Tumblr has some good stuff too.

Meanwhile, How Wired.co.uk grew a podcast audience of 20K makes the bizarre claim that it’s all been done on a budget of £350, as if everyone’s time is a freely available resource. Good article, otherwise.

Out Of The Ashes Of Dead Trees is another one of those posts about the transition from print to digital. It’s worth a read though. Also this line:

when we read online, we migrate to read people, not institutions

made sense in context and it’s one of those statements that crops up a lot. I don’t reckon it’s always true though.

60 fascinating digital stats from the London 2012 Olympics is pretty fascinating and also has some insight into the plans they made for various digital platforms too.

Alexis Madrigal’s article Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong sparked a fair bit of discussion. It was a theory about the extent of private sharing of content that goes on, measured via direct traffic to article URLs (as they’re more likely to be shared, rather than bookmarked or typed directly). There was also a good follow-up discussion here with some input from Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti (and a nice example of what Branch is useful for). Econsultancy got in on the act too, looking at this through their own stats.

Apps, services, etc

Finally…

True Skin is a film from Stephan Zlotescu about a cyborg on the lam in a futuristic Bangkok:

The short is set in the not-too-distant future where everyone is augmenting their bodies. The story’s hero can’t afford to augment in the U.S., so he heads to the black market of Bangkok, where he gets hold of a mysterious chip that he discovers is slowly turning him robotic – and is a hot commodity wanted by shadowy forces.

Published by Chris Unitt

I work at One Further, doing digital projects with cultural organisations. Follow @ChrisUnitt or find me on LinkedIn.

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