Last week, I chaired the “All in hand: Working with handheld devices conference”, which took place at the Royal College of Surgeon in London. It included various presentations from small- to large-scale UK museums discussing their experience with mobile interpretation.

... that's how I like my coffee. If you do too, then you could do much worse than keep an eye on the calendar of science enthusiasts Café Scientifique.

Last Tuesday, Josh and I headed down to Brighton's Latest Music Bar, which was playing host to a talk hosted by the local branch of said science aficionados. Café Scientifique Brighton are a voluntary group united by nothing more than a love of science and a thirst for knowledge. They meet on the third Tuesday of every month (from now on, the third Thursday of every month) and listen to talks they've arranged from guest speakers on, well, anything and everything scientific. Each talk is given on a different scientific topic by a different guest speaker, and while this happened to be my freshman outing amongst their ranks, I am assured by other regular attendees that the talks are always informative, entertaining, well presented and lively. The small cohort of organisers are joined by a large crowd of attendees (much larger than I - as a Scientifique first timer - was expecting I must admit); anyone and everyone is welcome and you don't even have to buy a ticket.

I attended the BBC Knowledge Multiplatform briefing day yesterday. The strategy outlined by Simon Nelson and others thankfully counteracted the soporific effects of being located in an airless room in the bowels of Broadcasting House, as the sun beat down on the London streets (it ain’t called the ‘big smoke’ for nothing).

Here are the highlights:

On ‘Permanence’ – Signalling a radical shift from the ephemerality of the linear broadcast slot, the BBC now has a system to automatically generate a permanent web page for every programme episode which, over time, can be further enriched with ratings, recommendations, synopses, AV, track listings and so on. As well as prolonging the life of the content beyond transmission and making it findable and linkable, the system has released time and budget previously spent on often rapidly pulled together and under-performing programme-related sites.  It’s currently in its beta version - visit it here.

So far so good; I can find out more about that track I liked in last week’s Mad Men for example. But what is so much more exciting is the prospect of applying the same system to the BBC archive – tens of decades of radio and television content opened up and made findable, shareable and mashable. Of course, as with most BBC projects of this scale and ambition – from the launch of BBC Two through expansion from terrestrial to digital in the late 90s to the launch of the iPlayer in late 2007 - the usual debates around public service and commercialism will no doubt rage.

Will the content be free at the point of use? Will it be limited to British people as licence-fee payers or made globally available but at a fee to non-UK residents? How might the release of such content impact upon the broader commercial market? These are just some of the potential areas of contention. I assume the findings from the Creative Archive pilot will feed significantly into the BBC’s thinking from here.

Women past and present have made countless valuable contributions to technology, but how often do we hear about it? Probably not enough. Hoping to help change this state of affairs, this post is written in honour of Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw more attention to women excelling in technology.

Not so long ago, Eleanor Rudge and I headed up to the British Museum for a conference on 'Designing for disability', organised by the Museums Association.

The aim of the day's talks was to

There's been quite a buzz on Cogapp's internal blog (initiated mostly by Joe Baskerville, our Head of New Technology) surrounding developments in "surface computing" - ways to make everyday surfaces like walls and tables interactive, designed to replace the traditional keyboard and mouse.

We've recently been playing with Open Frameworks (our first test project will show up in a blog post very soon) which is a C++ library that aims to provide people with some of the power available from a low-level programming language, while lowering the bar for entry.

There's a small but ever expanding group of people making beautiful things with code, using similar tools to Open Frameworks.  I've always found this kind of work inspiring - it's a great way for begin

Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more... er... authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe... and you (the public) believe us.

I must have read dozens of books about programming and related disciplines. Some are dull as ditchwater, but a lot of these are admirably clear in explaining and presenting the information they need to get across.