Links for 7 December 2011

Let’s start with something that made me nod my head quite a bit. It’s a post titled Digitally-literate staff are key to charity digital success and it’s a slightly better written version of a rant that I sometimes go off on. The whole thing’s worth but these bits will give you a flavour:

…the things that stand in the way of digital success. Internal politics, lack of money, lack of evidence, legacy technologies and lack of experience…

It’s one thing to deliver a fabulously interactive website, but if you don’t have the resources behind it to keep it running, it’ll be just window-dressing

No longer can those skills be the preserve of the harried and over-stretched digital teams. We have passed the tipping point where digital is something new, it just is

Moving on, I’m really not sure what to make of The Space. It’s “an experimental digital arts media service and commissioning programme” which doesn’t explain a great deal but there’s money and the BBC’s name attached, so people have jumped on it regardless.

The last arts funding cow to be fed to the raptors was the ACE/NESTA R&D Fund, with details of the commissioned projects now starting to emerge. For instance, over the next year the IWM Social Interpretation team will be regularly posting about their in trying to integrate social media models into museums’ outputs. It’s good to see these processes being documented in this way.

The abridged version of Mia Ridge’s notes for her talk, Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation have some good tips for designing participatory projects. In other talk-related blog posts, Hugh Wallace spoke about Beautiful small things at the National Gallery of Ireland’s 2011 Symposium, presenting five  projects that he believes exemplify good practice in digital media with an emphasis on the audience.

Arts/digital links

• Arte TV livestreamed La Boheme from a council block in Berne, with online viewers able hop between different camera angles. I’m really disappointed to have missed this.
• Silk was created by Yuri Vishnevsky as an experiment in generative art. It’s lovely.
• Details and links to all of the hacks produced during Culture Hack North.
• Mobile Museum is a series of semi-structured written interviews with people who have developed, authored or managed mobile projects.
• StageScan aims to give personalised theatre recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past, letting you follow individual creatives and/or critics. It’s kinda like the missing link between Theatricalia and Journalisted.
• Far too many infographics are rubbish but this one showing how much artists earn online (including last.fm, spotify, retail albums and mp3 downloads) is very good.
• PressBooks lets you author and output books in multiple formats, including epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML and inDesign-ready XML. Could be handy.
• The results are in on the steve.museum’s research project: Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums. They found that museum professionals and the general public speak different languages and that a high percentage of user-submitted tags were useful.
• On that theme, Brooklyn Museum’s Gallery Tag! is a pretty simple mobile tagging game, specifically designed for use in the gallery.

Other links

• A list of augmented reality case studies with plenty I’d never heard of,
• Hand waving and the “real work” of design – Why is handwaving not “real work?” And what is “real work,” in interaction design, anyway?
• Design Fiction: Profitable, Desirable, Buildable Products – a nice Venn diagram
• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part One) – The first in a series of five guest posts
• I liked how LEGO® CUUSOO has been put together. The ‘outstanding products’, highlighting anything that’s new or has a good level of comments or supporters, is good.
• Beware of the Sorrell: Advertising’s Social Contract Is Fucked – “If you want to sell me something, then you, personally, should sell me something, Not your company, not your brand, you. That’s the power of social media. It’s a bunch of people, talking to each other. It lets us rediscover how things used to be, lets us remember how millions of years of evolution have shaped us to be, lets us remember that we’re just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to buy some crab paste”
• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design – “this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible”
• Digital verbosity: What’s in a tweet – a map of a tweet including all its metadata
• the pen is mightier than the spork: Free writing seminar blog post in a box – Lots of links to good pieces on writing. Ian Ravenscroft recommended the bits about pitching, and who am I to argue?

Some apps and services

• Facebook – Odeon event organiser
• Products – Little Printer
• Web – Map Tales, Nestio, Gimme Bar, Small Demons, TaskRabbit, GetLostBot, Wunderlist, Sycorax and I like the social streams Flavors have rolled out but suspect I won’t use them
• iPhone – Stamped, The Show Must Go On, Treasures of the Bodleian

Finally

A barnstorming Gary Vaynerchuk keynote at Inc5000.