• Throngs of museum security guards donate hair to Locks of Love
• IMA race car art
• Indianapolis Zoo’s Naturally Inspired Paint Out: My favorite elephant
• Banana Republic’s 2008 ad campaign “The Art of Style: Captured Through Photography”
• Blogger Swap 2010 call out
• My senior thesis and why I believed new media was ruining the culture of Bhutan
• Current state of the art market with an insider’s look from Sotheby’s Institute of Art professors
• Corporate art in Indianapolis- What’s really hanging on the walls at Eli Lilly headquarters?
• The Plaster Belly Trend: 3 Dimensional replicas of pregnancy (only $24.99)
• How to get on the roof of the IMA, an in-depth investigation of the IMA Nuggets

• The girl behind the Upland Brewing Co. Twitterfeed and the cool green key chains she gave away at Bloggers Anonymous
• Micro-donations on the Blog. NPR does it well.
• My life changing experience with Tara Donovan at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati
• Following up with Indianapolis City Ballet: What’s next?
• “Synchronous Object for One Flat Thing, reproduced” Web site: Visualizing choreographic information in new ways
• Why people don’t buy art: A recap of OnTheCusp.org’s summer 2009 survey results
• Wilber takes on the Indianapolis Cultural Trail
• The life of a content migrator and why I love/hate wiki
• The making of an IMA Magazine cover (link coming soon)
• IDADA: The Year Ahead
• Sacred Spain: TAP tour survey trends, How did you rate the TAP experience?
• moosh in indy. -The coolest mommy blogger I know

Thank you for reading!

Yes, I was just in Washington DC, but this post isn’t going to be about national politics. A few of us recently returned from the Museum Computer Network conference – four days of workshops, presentations, and case studies on topics ranging from virtual machines to the semantic web. Since I totally forgot about having to blog upon our return, I’ll just share some of the bits I found interesting.

First off, Rob and I ran a workshop on building an exhibition site with Drupal. Anyone interested can download the slides on Slideshare. We gave a quick overview of the sites that we have built with Drupal so far, and then went through the process from installation to end product using the To Live Forever website as an example. We received very good feedback, and hopefully the particiants will go forth and create great websites.

Koven Smith of the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave a great talk on the inner workings of Semantic Web technology. I have heard a lot about the semantic web, but now I feel like I actually understand how it works. After this session my curiosity led me to pop in on the end of a discussion about copyright issues in virtual worlds… I’ll just say that the semantic web is more straightforward to me at the moment.

Youngjin Yoo, associate professor of Management Information Systems at Temple University, gave a great presentation making the case that innovation is a collaborative experience. In contrast to “change management”, in which a product is developed and a community is subsequently persuaded to use it, he argued that products must be designed with users in the loop. This is definitely part of good software engineering practice, where well informed use cases drive design.

We were also given an introduction to Ohana (the intranet system used by the Smithsonian) by Erin Weinman. Having created our own internal project management system, it was interesting to see how Ohana was designed to make use of MediaWiki. In fact, we have found that some Wiki-style form of document creation would be a great addition to our system, so we will be investigating this further.

Of course, there was much more that went on at the conference, but these are just a few of the things that stuck in my mind (as well as the half-day excursion I took to experience the National Mall for the first time.. my feet were killing me). Reading over my list, it is rather software development oriented, isn’t it? Well, keep your eyes peeled and I’m sure you’ll find other blogs covering MCN from another point of view. Or if you were there too, leave some comments!