Indianapolis Museum of Art Garden, Pony Bridge; contributed by Terry.Tyson

I’m not the only one captured by the seasons, as shown by the IMA Flickr Group.  As of this writing we have over 200 members and we are pushing dangerously close to 2000 images!  It’s wonderful to see the many vantage points brought together to a single point on the web.

Here’s a few photos I captured three years ago shortly after starting at the IMA.  They are not altered in any way.  I always revel in these photos and tell people about them.  So I am taking my opportunity now to share them with you.

Grab the extinguisher. This tree's on fire!

Check out the latest additions to the Flickr group and please join us by sharing your fall photos as well.

I’m going to let the images do most the talking, but please note that none of the design or content is completely finalized below.

Monsters vs. Aliens © Dreamworks Animation

I’m an avid NPR listener and I was intrigued by a segment a few weeks back that discussed the resurgence of 3D in the movie theater. The Dreamworks film, Monsters vs. Aliens, saw a $58 million opening weekend of which $24 million was from 3D screens (ref). Over 40% of the film’s revenue came from less than 10% of the screens. When 3D glasses first hit the big screen it was a less than desirable experience.  The alignment was less than par and many movie goers would leave feeling queasy. This is a far cry from the experience of today. People are more than willing to pay extra for the immersion and they will have many more chances in the near future.

“….G-Force on July 24, Final Destination: Death Trip 3-D on August 14, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on September 18, the reworking of Toy Story in the 3-D format October 2, Astro Boy on October 23, Disney’s A Christmas Carol on November 6, Planet 51 for Thanksgiving and, finally, James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar.” – from Slashfilm

Another 3D project caught my eye yesterday as well. A Google employee has leveraged his 20% time by creating a 3D video viewer for YouTube. You can see one view in the video below. Click the video and visit it on YouTube to see a dropdown of many different 3D option (e.g. anaglyph red/blue).

Artists have been capitalizing on perception for thousands of years, so I set out to find examples in our collection.  My esteemed colleague, Ed, pointed me to a technique called Trompe-l’œil (French for “trick the eye”). A quick search of the collections yielded some interesting results.

Still Life by Edwaert Colyer demonstrating Trompe-l'œil

Still Life demonstrates a perceived 3D scene from a 2D work and conversely we have 3D works that appear flat from the initial vantage point. Most notable is Robert Irwin’s, Untitled, which is anything but flat.

Untitled by Robert Irwin

Finally, a shout out to the sidewalk chalk artists.

World by Julian Beever

Do you have any favorites that “trick the eye”?

(On a tangent, NPR had a similar segment discussing the upcoming series of movies based on board games. Greatly looking forward to Candyland.)

A view of a user dashboard

Each user has a customizable dashboard with a personalized view into their projects and activity.  I might be considered an average user with 27 projects.  Some users have more than 100! The project order is customizable so you have quick access to your most frequent projects.

The project listing widget on the dashboard.

Below is a peek inside a project.  Each project can enable and disable features such as file sharing, an image gallery, tasks, etc.. You can also see recent activity on just the project you are viewing.

A view inside a project.

We wanted a way to engage users in the system and promote fast adoption.  Our solution was a built in gaming module. Users earn a small amount of points for every action they perform in Athena. — This feature can be turned off with the flick of a switch for those without a sense of joy in life. — As users earn more points they unlock new features. The features include themes and helpful widgets for their dashboard (e.g. a todo list).  Additionally, users are assigned a certain rank based on their points. Users must work hard to be promoted from “Newbie” to “Tom Brady” to “Intern” and so on.

An elite Athena user am I.

Below you can see an example of when a user earns a new feature.

You earned a new level.

Additional motivation is given by a ranking dashboard widget. Users can see other users right around them and track how to they move relative to others.

I will get you Daniel.

In the spirit of transparency, here is a few of the statistics we monitor. Of interest is that we have more external users than IMA staff users. Any staff member can invite any e-mail address to a project.  That external user gets their own dashboard and rank. In just 18 months we have accumulated over 11,000 files weighing in at 22GB of office documents. All these documents are indexed and their contents are searchable, so they are actually very easy to locate.

Athena statistics so far.

Moving ahead we would be interested in releasing Athena for others to use. It’s always a work in progress. We’re also keeping our eye out for better solutions that could come along.

Trying to keep up-to-date with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. is not a new problem.  There are entire desktop applications dedicated to aggregating this content for your consumption. Still I find myself drowned by the noise. It would be optimistic to say that a quarter of this social stream directly interests me. Additionally this content is decoupled from other forms of communication (i.e. SMS / e-mail).  These are some of the reasons why I am excited about the prospects of Google Wave.

Last week Google announced what can best be described as a communications platform.  It mixes traditional e-mail with a slew of modern features.  Real-time collaborative editing, event planning, and a game of chess are just a few of the tasks you can carry out from within the platform. — Anyone used SubEthaEdit? — The engineers developed Wave by asking themselves what e-mail would look like if it were invented today. The result is e-mail on steroids.

Where Facebook presents a view of the conversations from your hundreds of contacts, Wave focuses on conversations that you are directly involved with. You will even be able to branch new (private) conversations with whomever you wish. Conversations can be played back so late-comers can see how they evolved. How many times have you received a forward with broken fragments of conversation and you are supposed to understand all the context around it? No more my friends!

Concurrent rich-text editing in Wave

Much of Wave will be embeddable as well.  An example was shown of blog authoring from Wave.  Edits are published in real-time.  Comments on the blog are also pushed back to the wave interface in real-time. A blog author could immediately start up a conversation with a complete stranger who posts a comment on their article if they both happen to be online at the same time.

You are not bound to Google's Wave.

Another interesting note is that Google Wave is indeed a platform. An entire protocol is being developed so anyone can host their own Wave Server. Entire conversation can be held without leaving your intranet. Information only leaves your Wave host when outsiders are brought into the conversation. Still, parts of the wave that occur internally will stay internal. This platform also means we won’t be forced to consume ads down the road and we truly own the content.

If you have 80 minutes and a tolerance for poor presentation style, feel free to watch the announcement from Google I/O.

So they were running into some load issues, but then again they’re not your traditional search engine.  Wolfram Research is the software company behind Mathematica.  Mathematica is to a mathematician as the utility belt is to batman.  Suffice it to say, it’s pretty amazing software.  It came as somewhat of a surprise that the company was launching a search engine.  They are quick to denounce themselves as a Google replacement.  Search results in Alpha present more thoughtful and curated responses — if it knows what you’re asking.

As seen in their visual gallery, Alpha can inundate you with information, but it’s subjective if those results are useful or not.  A great example is, “United States“.  The information is fascinating, but I’m a little thrown off by lines of info such as “local currency conversion: $1 = $1“.  So where does Alpha win?  The value added is Alpha’s ability to understand your question.  Compare the results of the search “literacy rate of the United States” in Alpha and Google.  Alpha definitely gives the feeling of instant gratification.  Unfortunately, Alpha doesn’t know about the “Indianapolis Museum of Art” but at least they know “how many licks to the center of a tootsie pop“.

Google is not sitting idly by.  Announcing Google Squared:

Ok, so it needs some work.  Both Google and Alpha are proceeding with the same assumption though: “People are becoming better searchers”.  Google Squared will be a search system very similar to Alpha.  More importantly, Squared is going to be driven from semantic information.  The Semantic Web has been promised to revolutionize information online for many years now.  It was what many thought would be Web 2.0. — It’s looking more like 3.5 now. — In a nutshell, web pages can add additional information to convey the meaning of the content.  Search engines could use this information to better understand and relay this information.  Google does a good job of sending you to the right place now, but it is up to you and web providers to make sure you find what you were looking for next.  In a few years you might search for “operating hours of the IMA” instead of digging up the information yourself.  Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared are the first pushes to this mindset change.

An early screenshot of what a Google Squared result might look like.

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/05/19/a-new-kind-of-search/feed/ 1 http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/04/22/recapping-museums-and-the-web-2009/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/04/22/recapping-museums-and-the-web-2009/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:35:00 +0000 Charlie http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=4659 I thought I would follow up Ed’s MW2009 preview with an after the fact look at the online remnants of the conference.

Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award.  A huge congratulations from all of us at the IMA for a well-deserved recognition. (Be sure to watch their virtual thank you.)  As if that weren’t enough, I totally missed the news that Brooklyn released an API for their collection.  Even better, someone has already created an iPhone app for them using it.  Open developer access to the IMA’s collection just got a huge bump in priority for me.

We had a great meetup with some of the tech staff of NYPL.  Their group is of a scale and quality that we are quite envious of.  We are greatly looking forward to future collaborations with them. (They’re an ArtBabble partner.)

In the presentation realm the IMA had a cloud computing talk, an evaluation of online video for museums, a solicitation for feedback for the Steve in Action IMLS grant, and an ArtBabble demo.  Other favorites from outside the IMA include alternate reality games, a galaxy of pop stars, and a massive update coming soon to ArtsConnectEd.

Our own Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO gave the opening keynote which you can watch in full on ArtBabble or at the bottom of this post.  It even inspired a great series on transparency for the Museums and the Web conference itself.

A snapshot from Pepsi's real-time keyword swarm from SXSW

Take half of Twitter’s activity base, bring them together and you have SXSW.  This group of people are just some of the many that are driving what we will all know as the real-time web.  To the left you can see a screen shot I took this morning from a real-time keyword swarm driven by Twitter and SXSW attendees (compliments of Phil’s Pharmacy).

Twitter has been the source of many of these popups.  You can find a real-time evolving tag cloud of what’s popular right now, or if you are a finance junkie like me, get bleeding edge news and opinion on every stock in your portfolio.  Real-time updates on the real-time web anyone?  Finally, bring them all together on your desktop with TweetDeck.

Bringing it all together with TweetDeck

Facebook has jumped on the boat as well with the recent updates to user’s profile pages.  The emphasis has moved solely to the latest updates from your friends. Video sharing site UStream.tv has pushed the envelope by offering free streaming of live video to anyone.

Facebook's recent changes to promote real-time activity

Internet users are being groomed to have an expectation of receiving information as it is generated.  In an age where e-mail is the new snail mail, could a start-up with a decent semantics engine make Reuters tremble?

You can click on any of the graphs to get a larger view.  The points in the graph are all ArtBabble users.  The lines between the points represent an invite that was sent.  The top point in this graph represents a fake user, “ArtBabble”, that has “invited” all the first tier of users.  The blue lines represent these pseudo-invites.  The red lines represent an invite that was sent and has not yet been accepted.  Finally, the green lines represent an invite that was sent and accepted.  This graph also lets us easily see that the longest invite chain included six people.

This graph shows the same information as before, but is layed out a little different.  Finally, it was interesting to drop the fake ArtBabble user to get another perspective.  It’s fairly easy to pick out who our power-inviters are.

Thanks to all those who have spread the love, and drop us a line if you would like an invite.  Once we can announce a few of the partners, we will retire the invites and allow ArtBabble to go public.

• A slight twist on Isaac Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics.

Type 'about:robots' into Mozilla Firefox

• An excerpt of the book of Mozilla.

Type 'about:mozilla' into Mozilla Firefox

• Google’s ode to the “bushism“.

Type 'about:internets' into Google Chrome

• A close relative to the easter egg is ASCII art.  Sit back and enjoy the big screen like never before.  In windows, go to “Start” -> “Run” and type in “cmd”.  In the command line type, “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl” and then hit enter twice.

Type 'telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl' into the Windows Command Prompt

Do you have any favorite easter eggs I might have missed?