Thursday, March 20, 2008

The future of the Web...

Sitting here at the National Digital Archive Program meeting here in Taipei is one of the most thrilling events I have taken place during the last couple of years.

It also makes me a little bit depressed looking at how little ingenious we are in the domain of biodiversity and conservation. I guess, EOL would do good to listen to this community, even it is more about humanities, libraries and social networks.

The lectures and presentation will be online, so it will be good to check out, once they are up. Especially worthwhile to start are the lecturs on Thursday afternoon to get an idea on what is happening in the Web, what people think and use.

Interesting, though in a way really trivial ideas with explosive potential is to re-construct museums to add geographic tags so that you could see content in context. Of course that means that if all the vast amount of artefacts in our collections would be marked up, the emphasis would rather be on subjects than on the museum, and thus branding of the museum might have a set back. The feeling though is, that through this, many hidden things are being discovered, and additional coverage is given to institutions through channels un-imagined before.

There is no way to stop this development, whether we like like it or not....

Here an eclectic mix of interesting topics and links to: Web2.0, calais (to extract and link content); greenstone to build up a bibliography; wordpress

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

John Downer: Do it for nature, not to conform to standards


John Downer, an incredible animal documentary maker, is explaining in this youtube clip some of his tricks to get the proper shots to document animal behavior. One of his credos is to be guided by what you want to achieve and not how things are generally done.