I’m old.   I’m grumpy.  I’m tired.  I still look fabulous though.

I’ve got ideas for ideas for drafts of dozens of posts.  In the past few months I’ve been on the road to Fort Lauderdale, Toronto, Cozumel, Sarasota, Montreal, Denver, and New York City–most of these trips were business-related and generated ideas for posts with titles like:  ”Museums and Web 2:0: It’s A Lot More Fun than What We Ought to Be Doing,” “Open Source, Open Eyes, Open Conversations,” “How Do Solve a Problem Called Museums,”  “If It’s Not Free and It’s Not Cheap and It’s Not Easy, Why Are We Doing It,”  “If It is Free, and It Is Cheap, and It Is Easy Do We Have to Do It,”  “What do you mean you aren’t going to digitize it?”  “Hey It’s Only Our Cultural and Intellectual Heritage, Who Cares?”

But I’m not writing any of those because real life has gotten in the way of my academic and idealistic concerns.

Let’s take this past Wednesday…there I was smack dab in the middle of two days of web site envisioning when I woke up Wednesday morning, bright and early, at 6 am to wake up my son and start him on the long…..arduous journey of getting ready for school.  Normally I am the first person down in the kitchen to start the coffee but, for whatever reason, my son beat me downstairs.  I knew he was down there but with no lights on in the kitchen I wandered sleepily into the family room to find him curled up on the couch with a blanket over his head. 

I asked him if he’d gotten any breakfast and he briefly put his head above the blanket and muttered “Look at the kitchen table.”  I turned on the lights in the kitchen and to my dismay (okay that’s a mild word for my response) saw evidence of RATS.  Not little tiny cute fuzzy mice.  Freakin rats the size of small pumas had been at work in my fruit bowl, the cat food (in plastic containers), and anything else remotely edible.  So instead of making coffee and drinking it in the normal 10-15 minutes I have in the morning. I cleaned and scrubbed and shuddered and worried (the whole invasion seems perhaps to have something to do with the leak in the water main leading from the house which is going to require the digging up of the landscaping in my front yard.)

So it isn’t until 7:45 that Prince Charming and I head off to take him to school–a 25 minute trip which now needs to be accomplished in 20 minutes (includes driving 20 miles an hour through two separate school zones) or he will get his first demerit of the year.  This is something that is not to be even spoken of and can’t happen.  We made it in time, don’t ask me how, and from there I hop on the highway to get to downtown before the web site envisioning process starts at 9 am–this is a 30-40 minute drive at the best of times, rush hour is something else again. 

At 8:55 I pull into the valet parking garage across the street from where I work. That sounds fancier than it is.  I rush across the street in the opposite direction to grab coffee so I can survive the meeting without thinking about rats (BIG RATS IN MY KITCHEN) the whole time. 

For a brief few hours it looks like the day is going to be normal….and then…

Mid-morning the facilitator asked me to present a brief overview of web stats just after lunch.  Hmm, not prepared to do that but hey, I’m a professional, so I skip the catered lunch and head upstairs to my desk and then I think to myself, “Self, woudn’t it be useful for these folks if I also gave them some context by giving them the results the really useful survey Nik conducted last year on behalf of Media & Technology (http://musematic.net/?p=123)?   And, Self, I bet if you call Nik, even though it’s three hours earlier there, he’ll be in the office and help you out.”

So, in a hurry and not thinking clearly, with my left hand I opened the contacts page of my outlook, and found Nik’s number at work.  With my right hand I picked up the phone on my desk, stuck it up to my ear and held it there with my chin, and while looking at my computer screen and Nik’s number, I dialled “911.”

OMG

Expecting the dulcet tones of Nik Honeysett, imagine my surprise to be greeted with an anxious voice asking “911, what is your emergency?”

I explained to the nice 911 fellow there that he probably could not help me with my web stat issues.  Hung up the phone.  Bashed my head into my desk and called the real Nik Honeysett.  Sigh.  He and his faithful Ms. Moneypenny (aka Moira) provided me with the stats I needed and voila I was back off to the web envisioning.

If only that were the end of it….meanwhile…flash forward to the end of that very long work day….wandering back across the street to the garage, I paid my parking fee, and went up to the nice gentlemen in charge of retrieving automobiles.  They asked me what kind of car I drove. I told them, and they said (oh so politely)…”next time I park there could I please remember to leave them my keys.”  

That’s right kids.  I, Holly Witchey, left my car in a major downtown valet parking garage and took my keys with me.  What an idiot!

Meanwhile…Isaac the Rat Guy came by yesterday and spread the poison on around so I’m hearing fewer and fewer tiny paw-steps at night. 

Just wanted you to know though that, like the rats,

I’M NOT DEAD YET!!!!

This one is from Bill Patry’s excellent blog:

“Happy Birthday Now Pay the License Fee”

“…for copyright geeks, the traditional Happy Birthday has provided fodder for what all that is wrong with copyright. Now, Professor Robert Brauneis of George Washington Law School has blessed us with an exhaustive treatment of the song.”

Here’s the link to the article, “Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song“: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1111624

According to Patry “The article is a tour de force of historical research as well as a probing inquiry into how copyright works that have fallen into the public domain can still command serious income through the inability of others to spend the time and money to track down the provenance of the claims to copyright in them. ”

Time to make coffee and start reading: “67 and a half pages of history of the song and the copyright issues surrounding it.” Happy Birthday.

From the You’re Kidding, Right? department: BBC sends legal threat over fan’s Dr Who knitting patterns.

Not competing reproduction of knitting patterns, mind you. The creation of and sharing (for free) of knittings patterns. For those Dr Who fans who desire to knit their favorite characters.

I mean, this begs the question of who’s the more sadly obsessed eccentric here. Have these lawyers stopped to actually think for a moment about what they are doing?

Further information at the aptly named Death by Copyright blog.

AAM Denver’s done and I’m looking forward to a 48-hour nap without the AC running all night. Among various committee and board meetings, I managed to do two presentations. I had the pleasure of presenting a session with two women each with a fantastic sense of humour: Holly Witchey and Diane Andolsek. The session was titled Are the inmates running the Asylum? and as Perian succinctly pointed out, the short answer is yes.

In reviewing my presentations, I now realize that I seem to have an obsession about including quotes in them, and my blog. I remember reading a quote about how useless you are if you repeatedly use other people’s quotes to get a point across. Well, tough shit:

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
- George Bernard Shaw

Even though the “inmates” presentation was meant as a respite to the regular type of session (I never said the others were dull), there was much truth in the technology-in-museums-humour that we found.

First, please take a moment to check the current stats on IMA’s dashboard. Please memorize, there’ll be a test later…

The self-proclaimed(?) World’s Smallest Museum has a website. The website is very 1990s with blinking text, ticker tape scrolling text, saturated colours, and other abuses we all did for our first website. But they have a website. It has everything you would expect the World’s Largest Museum website to have: Directions, Visitor Guide, Virtual Tour, Collection, Online Store, Contact Us, About Us, FAQs and a curious “wanted” page about Osama Bin Laden… I have no idea either. The website is rated “safe for kids” by SafeSurf (any of us bother with that?) and it even has some engaging Visitor Photos pages. Nope, neither do we…

So, its not how big you are, its how many online visits you get. You can be as big as you want online and what percentage of the surfing population cares whether your website abuses fonts and colours? How many of them even notice? A case in point was the woman at the business center in the conference center. I prepared a MUSE Award Nikipedia entry as part of my MUSE Award introduction and had to print it out. (Congratulations to all the winners by the way). It includes a Photoshopped picture of me as Nick Nolte during his high-profile arrest in Malibu. The woman, who was awfully nice, asked me how old I was when the picture was taken. I explained, but she was convinced it really was me. I thought every one else in the world could spot those fake photos in movies of the hero “photographed” with real celebrities or politicians… apparently not.

Speaking of the World’s Largest Museum, “5,000 years of history… 5 years with the same website homepage”:

Just because you’re a large museum, doesn’t always mean you can “do stuff”. Sometimes, the fact that you are a large museum means you find it incredibly difficult to do stuff. More people means more opinions, it can mean less clarity of who’s in control and less clarity of who’s responsible. When there’s no clarity of responsibility, literally anyone who has an opinion can derail a project. Being “scrappy” and having one or two people who have to do a project “soup to nuts”, is sometimes the only way to do things. Also, just because you’re a large museum sometimes doesn’t mean you have any new media staff. Before anyone complains, notice I said sometimes…

Still on the subject of large and small museums, a parody using Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” advert to highlight the advanced thinking of small museums (driven by necessity) on the use of available technologies and services:

Handheld Project

Now, some more advanced thinking of libraries over museums on the use of available technologies and services:

Museum vs. Libraries

If you wouldn’t mind, could you check again, just in case - thanks.

Google were also in the news at the session. News Headlines!:

Microsoft buys Yahoo! Google retaliates by buying the state of Washington

As were Mozilla:

Mozilla Employees Actually Set Fox on Fire!

And some of our favorite hardware suppliers:

HP/Compaq and Dell Merge: “Hell.”

I got to see a couple of presentations, the best of which by far was one on user-generated content. Jane Burton from the Tate showed of some of the delivered and experimental projects that they have using user-generated content, but the star was Shelley Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The self-proclaimed “Scrappy” Manager of Information Systems who is doing all this on a shoestring but had great success in shaming the rest of into getting our arse in gear. Why is it that the best presentations start with an announcement to the audience that they should lower their expectations for what comes next. Bravo Shelley.

Media and Technology debuted a series of 101 technology tutorials at the conference, which we are hoping to provide at subsequent conferences. One of them was how to create a video podcast run by Robin White Owen of MediaCombo. In 75 minutes she managed to teach a group of 60 how to create and upload a video podcast. You can download the handout which gives concise instructions on how to do this with as minimal investment as possible - about $100 for a flip USB video camera and $30 for the pro version of Quicktime. If you’re a 501(c)(3) you can apply here for a flip camera giveaway.

If you plan to start podcasting please heed this warning on the potential dangers of podcasting. (Click “Open” to play in your browser window).

We included a roundup of technology-related haikus, real truths in all of them, like this one on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia
just goes to prove it’s true that
million monkeys type.

Which only goes to confirm this entry on Nikipedia on a brief history of technology in museums

Continuing my obsession with quotes, a couple of choice ones we found (albeit slightly doctored):

The most overlooked advantage to using a museum handheld is that if they foul up there’s no law against wacking them around a little.

– Joe Martin

Websites are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.

– Otto von Bismarck

Bradley’s Bromide: If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into one of AAM’s Standing Professional Committees – that will do them in.

– Unknown

One more time? I heard something changed… - can you spot it?

There was a recent study on how revealing online names are to your personality - apparently even the thinnest slice of Computer Mediated Communication — the e-mail address — contains valid information about the personality of its owner - see here. Coincidently Dwight Schrute enjoys his real life so much he wanted a second one, everything is the same including his name, except he can fly. Unlike these people - a sample of our favorite blogging names:

BostonPimpDaddy
BloggyMcBlogBlog
MrBlahBlah
JustinCredible
OMG! Ponies!

The session didn’t get to half of the material we found, a lot of it videos of early Internet or computer stuff. Its all here in its full glory for your viewing pleasure in a Jeopardy! style interface - it was a PowerPoint-free session. Some of it may make no sense at all to you, without alcohol, but my personal favorite is Two Women and a Blog under Too Much Time - the blooper real is a classic.

Technology and Museums–Are the Inmates Running the Asylum?

currently sitting in Holly, Nik, and Diane Andolsek’s very serious morning session: Technology in Museums: Are the Inmates Running the Asylum?

Short review: Yes. yes they are.

(more photos from AAM on my Flickr page)

It’s about time. A nice defeat for the RIAA.

From the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation):

“The district court in Atlantic v. Howell today denied the recording
industry’s motion for summary judgment against Mr. and Mrs. Howell,
two lawyer-less defendants caught up in RIAA’s litigation campaign
against file-sharers….”

“In its order, the court delivers the most decisive rejection yet of
the recording industry’s “making available” theory of infringement
(i.e., if someone could have downloaded it from you, you’ve violated
copyright, even if no one ever did). Citing to the recent ruling in
London-Sire v. Doe, the court concludes that “[t]he general rule,
supported by the great weight of authority, is that infringement of
the distribution right requires an actual dissemination of either
copies or phonorecords.” The court goes on to conclude that downloads
by the recording industry’s own investigator, MediaSentry, are not
enough to establish distribution, at least based on the facts of this
case (Mr. Howell maintains that, unbeknownst to him, the Kazaa software
was sharing his entire hard drive). Finally, the court also suggests
that P2P file-sharing may not implicate the distribution right at all,
reasoning that what is really going on is a series of reproductions.”

Interestingly, Mr. Howell maintained that he used Kazaa only to
download porn, and not music. Good thing there’s no such thing as the PIAA (is there?).

One of the interesting, and sometimes frustrating, things about this era of instant communication is how new ideas are adopted and modified within a very short time period. As a result, one good idea is used by twenty different people (or a hundred, or a thousand, or etc.) to create the same product, all with a different angle.

This is true with modern social networking sites (SNS) in particular (by “modern” I am referring to web-based, graphics-driven applications, not Usenet or forums or listservs). The earliest sites, like Friendster, Classmates.com, and Six Degrees, all grew from the capacity of the database-driven web to store and identify connections between individual persons. These sites were able to fulfill a need for like-minded people to meet and explore interests, while storing and displaying user-generated content to generate new subscribers. However, most of the early sites were not able to sustain their memberships and, with the exception of Classmates.com, are either defunct or barely hanging on.

Today, there are two major SNS: MySpace and Facebook. Each of these has a very different look and feel and target audience. MySpace was originally built around the indie music scene and, as a result, has a large population of alternative young folks. Facebook was designed to connect college students together (originally, only Harvard). Thus, its population tends to be more professional and the look and feel is very slick.

Both of these sites can be used for promoting a business or a club or an individual, but you’re going to get a very different audience. For bands, having a website is not enough anymore. According to a local listserv I’m on, promoters are booking bands based on the number of “friends” the band’s MySpace profile has. Likewise, a technologist such as myself earns some benefit by being on Facebook and connecting with other technologists (though I would hope that my future job opportunities is not based upon my Facebook profile!!). I feel much the same pressure to join LinkedIn right now, for the same reason.

Where these sites differ is in the approach. MySpace could just as easily be called MeSpace with its focus on me, me, me, me, and, oh yeah, me. A MySpace profile displays pictures, comments from friends, a blog, embedded music and video, and often the most painful HTML on the planet, individually designed by the profile’s creator to display their individual style. To connect with other users, one has to interact with them through other profiles or subject groups.

Facebook differs in one major way: although the capability to customize one’s profile page is actually far greater in Facebook than in MySpace, users are not permitted to blind and deafen other users with auto-playing audio and flashing fonts. The look and feel of the site is static for all of the users. I know that this seems like a very superficial point, but it’s a telling one when trying to determine which SNS fits your needs and if the psychology of the site’s visitors is compatible with yours.

Personally, I use two other SNS on a regular basis: Livejournal and Tribe. Livejournal is my personal blogging site, and I’ve also subscribed to a number of RSS feeds and Livejournal Communities, which are topical discussion profiles. The downside to Livejournal is that one has their content fed to them in list form, so I must remember to bookmark a post I particularly find of interest (or use Livejournal’s Memory feature). Contrast this practice to that of Tribe, which utilizes a forums methodology where the topics for discussion are listed within a Tribe and it’s relatively easy to refer back to the topics of interest for days at a time. A small orange asterisk notifies the user that there is new activity with in the Tribe and the topics within.

Because Tribe is designed with social interaction and community in mind (its original target audience is the Burning Man community), all activities within the site are centered around the subject Tribes. Compare this practice with MySpace and Livejournal, where interacting with individuals (or showing yourself off) is the name of the game. Facebook tries to incorporate both of these principals, and it’s fun to read about others’ activities, but the site ultimately leaves me cold, since the group communication features are fairly cumbersome and not front and center.

I do want to take a moment to mention Ning, the interface of which follows the topical, community-based methodology, but offers all of the features of the others. What’s different about it is that it is an umbrella site, where individuals can easily create their own SNS within the site, using their options and interface.

For museums looking to join the SNS wave, it appears that the winner right now is Facebook, due to its community of professionals and its clean interface. However, they should not dismiss MySpace out of hand, as MySpacers are often very artistic and interested in museums. It may take a bit more work, however, to speak their language and to get them to participate, but the Documentation Generation will help you promote your museum just by talking about you (and by sharing pictures and video and blogging about the fact that your current exhibition has an awful lot of photographs of people in underwear).

If you can, go to each SNS and take some time to sign yourself up and join a few groups (don’t forget to put up a profile picture! This matters, believe it or not. People won’t take you seriously without one). Learn what language the natives are speaking and try to communicate on their terms. See if the site works for you and your institution and strategize how to best get your information out there. Often, one of the best ways to do this is to get staff to join and participate, since individual interactions will link back to the institution as well as promote it - even without explicit promotion. I can’t even begin to count how often I have met an interesting person online and looked at their profile to see their interests. I’ve joined a number of groups I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered without the active participation of an interested individual.

Other popular sites:
Orkut (Google product, mostly used in South America and Central America)
Bebo (AOL product, Europe)
CyWorld (Asia and Pacific Islands)
Hi5 (South America)

Museums and the Web wrapped up yesterday.  I won’t blog about that because I didn’t get to attend the conference but came in for a series of meetings including today’s all day meeting of the STEVE social tagging project team.

We are meeting at the Hilton Bonaventure Montreal, an unusual property, the hotel is actually the top few stories of a sort Brutalist architecture office block.  It’s rather like we are staying in a little isolated island at the top of the city because outside the windows, instead of a central light well, is a beautifully landscaped garden, complete with evergreen trees, ponds, and ducks.  It’s been grey and rainy for the better part of the two days I’ve been here and today a very light snow is falling.

Towards the end of lunch after we had discussed things like lettting visitors write their own metadata for objects, the prescient nature of earlier papers at Museums and the Web, and whether or not Peter Samis is actually a character from The Wire… we wrote a group Haiku based on the fact that the windows in this room are tall and narrow like Japanese screens.  So here’s our group Haiku (Andrea, Ray, WIlly, Michael, Bruce, Susan, Peter, and myself):

Snowflakes in April

Curtains conceal the treeline

Ducks say W.T.F.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2

I’m thinking a lot about Shakespeare these days because, in my other life, I have to give a presentation next month on life and living and love in Shakespeare’s time for a local theater company.  I’m a big fan of Shakespeare, I always have been, comes from having a whackjob Southern mother with a degree in English literature–I won’t say I absorbed Shakespeare in my mother’s milk, I will say she was probably reading it when she should have been teaching me useful things like how to put on lipstick, but hey, that’s water under the rickety old bridge.

The thing I like about Shakespeare is he’s got something for everyone no matter what type of mood you are in–and tonight I’m feeling particularly depressed about the world we work in (as cultural heritage information professionals).  You don’t need to know why, you just need to know, as a reader, that we bloggers are human (like you we hope) and are subject to the ups and downs. “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.”

 ”Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.”  I’ve been working in museums since I was 20–my first stint at the Fine Arts Museum of the South In Mobile, Alabama–where I did everything from hand copy the blueprints to lecture on holography and lead a Pysanky workshop teaching Mobilians how to decorate Ukranian Easter eggs.   I wrote a paragraph, which I just deleted, about what I’ve accomplished in a 27 year career in museums and then I thought…it doesn’t matter if other people know what I’ve accomplished, what matters is, as I said to a colleague last week, when I lay my head down on the pillows last night can I honestly say I made the right decision when a hard decision was required?  This above all: to thine own self be true.

I’m heading off to Montreal for a meeting tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to seeing colleagues, but more importantly, I’m looking forward to seeing friends. A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.

Copyright Alliance Surveys Pres Candidates’ Commitment to Copyright Laws and Artists’ Rights

A promising headline, but read on.

“The Copyright Alliance is a 44-member-coalition that includes, among others, the RIAA, MPAA, Business Software Alliance, CBS, NBC, News Corp., NFL, MLB, NBA, Microsoft, Sony, Viacom, and Walt Disney, has submitted a questionnaire to all 17 of the candidates vying for the 2008 Presidential nomination of their respective parties.
It tries to impart a sense of dramatic urgency on the candidates by claiming that America’s dominance in the global economy is at stake.”

So, “artists’ rights” doesn’t mean what it sounds like. It means corporate rights.

“For its part, RIAA head Mitch Bainwol says that the future of the American economy will be driven by our minds and not our hands, thus creating the need to protect what our minds create…

I found his statements particularly humorous because the RIAA has never used its hands to create anything, instead living off the backs of artists and consumers it’s been ripping off for decades…

Hopefully all the presidential candidates will focus on national security and healthcare instead.”

Unfortunately, yes. Unless we get their attention first.