Beyond the Button

Lots of us museum folks are thumping our laptops trying to get the cultural heritage and informal science world into the Web 2.0 technology age. But are we just buffalo rushing towards another cliff--a bubble perchance? I don't really think so but this video pokes fun at the idea and had me rolling on the floor laughing.

I especially lost it when I saw "friendship bracelets + newspapers" as their mock business because there is quite the black market industry in friendship bracelets here at our museum.

I love del.icio.us! I use it a lot and think it could be way useful for just about anyone who uses the web. But if you have ever tried to convince a group of non-tech-nerds that it might help them out with their missions then you know the uphill battle I've faced. You not only have to cajole them into signing up for a del.icio.us account but you need to explain the concept of "social" bookmarking, teach them to tag, and then convince them that this will actually be more useful than just keeping their bookmarks on their local computer.

In steps The Common Craft Show. These folks are building a set of fun and quirky videos that do a marvelous job at explaining tech tools to the general population. This great example shows why teachers might want to use del.icio.us. I couldn't have said it better myself. No really I couldn't have.

Screenfont.ca looks like it could be interesting for the museum world.

Screenfont.CA is an activity of the Open & Closed Project. We are researching and developing a set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.

Goodness knows we could benefit from standardizing to something across our institutions.