: General

I am an Intranet & Web Developer working for Amgueddfa Cymru and this blog entry is about The Next Web Conference held in Amsterdam 15th - 17th April.

If you avoid the tourist areas after 9pm, Amsterdam is a calm and laid back city. People are friendly and the only dangers are the thousands of cyclists criss-crossing pavements and over-enthusiastic refuse collection trucks spinning three-sixty at road junctions – I believe the trams are there to provide safe passage over longer distances.

Anyhow, the first “unConference” day was a little loose in how it was arranged, but intentionally so. I ventured to the Mobile DevCamp and Music & Bits sessions:

Steve Jang, CMO of social music service iMeem gave away one of his insights: despite Apple’s current dominance in the market, Google’s Android shouldn’t be underestimated and would provide decent mobile development/financial opportunities - I should clarify that this conference had money iconography and business models roaming all over it. 

Continuing with the music theme, Lucas Gonze presented one of the infrequent talks of the three days that tried to avoid direct business model chatter. His main reference point was Fresh Hot Radio, which allows people to propagate musical playlists and tracks in a sympathetic manor. Most of his selections appeared to be demos, third drafts found on web forums and such (all good); but his point was that the original author information was not lost through web propagation (embeds and share links). The website pages were simple, but they always tried to use the sometimes-scarce sources of artwork from the actual musician - it’s about the music after all. Jolly good.

Other sessions discussed and demonstrated musical ideas using mobile phones to aid interaction between the user and music. One example used an accelerometer as part of a university project, Mustick (PDF) - interesting because the development time was short.

There were Sun Microsystem start-up presentations intermittently throughout the next couple of days. The Mendeley pitch was engaging in that it approached the research world: organise your research papers across multiple computers and help find trends within your particular research field (museum's are full of curators and researchers). It is built on Adobe Air, I believe - the proliferation continues.

Andrew Keen conceptualised the state/ideal state of the web using both flamboyant and succinct language. I enjoyed his enthusiastic approach, even if certain conclusions appeared to be driven by the need for a good sound bite, rather than firm logic - "web 2.0 is dead, long live Twitter".

A Dave sidetrack: Andrew Keen used a Johannes Vermeer painting to demonstrate a particular intensity of human interaction: Woman reading a letter. I couldn’t recall the artist Jonathan Janson at the time, a fact that you wouldn't have known, but he created a humorous painting influenced by Vermeer: A young girl writing an email.

Turn on the radio, read a web article, visit the next web conference, Twitter is doing the rounds - that is fine and dandy. It can be used for good (twestival.com), it has an open API  - aggregate this source into your website/application. A conference recommendation to help control your Twitter action appeared to be: Tweet Deck, another Adobe Air application.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress guy, had a similar vibe to the Jonathon Harris’ chat at the FOTB ’08, which I didn’t object to at all. The word “why” was mentioned. Fair enough I say.

Eric A. Meyer shared his love of JavaScript and how it allows developers to control browser standards: for instance, using JavaScript and CSS to enable keyboard control of flash media players. Cleaning up Microsoft Internet Explorer to make it a standards-compliant browser, from IE5 - IE8 – see Dean Edwards work. Meyer's conclusion: web standards can be forced on the web browsers without the need for plug-ins, and backward compatibly could be maintained.

Another Dave sidetrack: since leaving the conference I have wandered through the saveIE6 website. My web developer love of IE6 has been restored, I have seen the light - I shouldn’t fight it.

Michael J. Brown, an architectural theorist and practitioner (nice), completed the conference. He pointed out that current 3D environments have a little too much benzoic sulfinide (artificial sweetener) [Mr. Brown didn't use this kind of language] -  they fail because they are merely trying to replicate the real world. Who needs hardware? He finished with the cocoon concept, a learning pod.

Exhibition ideas:

A scaled back research project of the cocoon: It would involve three back-projected screens, a touch screen and/or blue-toothed mobile phone with an accelerometer (you’re missing the point Dave - my head is in my hands) - Minority Report on a shoe-string.

Based on the MiNiBar in Amsterdam, where you have a key to your own fridge, create an installation where you have key to a locked cabinet and people are only allowed to explore the particular contents of their chosen cabinet.

Yes, I think I’ve been affected.

Conference take-aways:

• JavaScript is still great
• The world of APIs and data aggregation wont stop tomorrow - disparate sources are being published somewhere as one
• You can’t create communities, they already exist
• The world wide web is the social network

Museums & the Web 2008 has been a lively, interesting conference. As I'm still digesting all the knowledge from the many sessions, I'd like to talk how about how it all started: with a tour of the city's museums. This was a great day and I wish all the talks could be delivered from familiar surroundings, as staff talk about their projects in such a relaxed, off-the-cuff way and can actually show you the galleries that they're so proud of. Of course, with museums represented here from all over the world, Powerpoint has to suffice most of the time.

The first stop on the tour was the McCord Museum, which is a museum of Canadian history in downtown Montreal. They started by talking us through the new personalisation features on their web-site, coming under the banner of My McCord. These allow users to choose their favourite works, to tag them, annotate them (including annotating areas of images) and more.

These are features we've been considering for Rhagor, so it was also useful to see another implementation of this critiqued by experts in the Crit Room yesterday. It's a difficult thing to get right from a usability point of view, but the most compelling reason to do it is that it isn't an end in itself. If a user can register on your site and get access to new features, the possibilities extend to exhibitions and events that haven't even been planned yet.

They were also doing some interesting work with tagging. One of the problems of tagging is actually getting users motivated to go in add a bunch of tags to your collection. They achieved this through an interactive game which pitted taggers against other taggers (or the computer), the aim being to enter keywords that matched the other play. I wondered how the competitive nature of the game would affect the type of tags that users submitted, but it seems to work, and the difference in uptake between this and traditional tagging was a huge argument in its favour.

The next stop on the tour was the Science Centre. The highlight was a fantastic interactive lab where children put together short news items on topics such as genetic engineering or drugs in sport. They not only get to engage in a science debate, but they're simultaneously learning the basics of video editing, presenting their own news items and about how the media shows different sides of an argument. Really intuitive software too - impressive.

The final stop was the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where they talked us through their new collections management system and how they've made it work for them. The basic system is The Museum System, or TMS, and this was a piece of software I kept hearing about this week. I'll be mentioning TMS and an open-source solutions called OpenCollection in a later entry.