Museums and the Web 2007: Day 0

I am currently in San Francisco, for the Museums and Web 20007 conference. I was pleased to be invited to be a member of the Program Committee last year, as I am seeking greater involvement with the museums sector. It was therefore appropriate for me to make a number of submissions to the conference – and I was pleased that all four submissions were accepted, although the proposal for a half day workshop was cancelled due to only a small number of bookings for the workshop. I’ll describe my other contributions to the conference in other postings.

I have just registered for the conference, on the day before the conference officially starts. Various half day and full day workshops are being held today – and I find it very interesting that so many are addressing Web 2.0 issues e.g. “Beyond Blogging: Is it a Community Yet?“, “Museum Mashups“, “Planning Social Media for Museums“, “Power To the Pod People: Design Your Own Podcast“, “Leveraging The Internet Video Book in a Museum Context“, “Web 2.0: Technologies and Design Strategies for Robust Online Applications“, “Real Science 2.0: Interacting with Scientific Imagery and Live Data“, “Remixing Museum Education through Online Participatory Learning“, “Exploring RSS in a Cultural Content“, “Creating Interactive Content and Community in Second Life” and “Vodcasting: 5 Easy Steps to Film an Interview and get it Online in a Day!“.

It seems that eleven of the twelve half-day workshops cover Web 2.0 technologies or user-created content and only the three full day workshops cover traditional Web topic areas (CMSs, online learning and usability testing). Perhaps this might explain the lack of interest in our half-day workshop on accessibility – all of the workshop participants want to learn more about Web 2.0 (indeed all of the morning sessions were fully subscribed when I registered this morning.

I’ll be very interested in the talks on use of Web 2.0 within a museums context over the next few days.

I’ll try and give a daily report from the conference – although the WiFi network in my hotel is very flaky.

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