On Wednesday I attended a one-day seminar at the excellent Dana Centre. Organised by Museum ID, it focused on the cultural sector's use of social media, broadcasting and the web, with lots of concrete examples from UK museums and heritage organisations.

The day started with a presentation from John Stack, Head of Tate Online. In it, he emphasised the need for a two-way dialogue between museums and their audiences, and provided several concrete examples of when the Tate has done exactly that with regard to tying in with physical exhibitions. These projects included: How We Are Now, where visitors were asked to contribute photos to a Flickr pool, the best of which were exhibited in the gallery; Tate Tracks, with visitors contributing their own artwork-inspired audio; Street or Studio, where the best contributed photos were made into a limited edition book; and finally a short-story competition to tie in with the TH.2058 exhibition in the Turbine Hall, with the best entries made into an audio podcast narrated by ex-Dr. Who Christopher Eccleston.

Next up was a presentation by Adrian Arthur, the Head of Web Services of the British Library. He outlined some of the BL's experiments with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and podcasts, as well as their experience in opening up their sound recording archives to user generated content such as tags and annotations. Then he emphasised the need for cross-departmental cooperation in achieving the goal of disseminating the two key strengths of the library: its enormous amount of content, and the expertise of its curators. His colleague Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services, then took over to discuss the changes in both technology and user expectation which will be instrumental in shaping services in the future. As part of this he demonstrated some innovative and exciting ideas for researcher tools, including a rich multi-tiered interface that can provide for both lay and specialist audiences, and which could incorporate cutting-edge visualisation techniques alongside original source material (e.g. a 3D terrain view, synchronised with historical maps).

This weekend saw Brighton's third barcamp, held at the Students' Union building at the University of Sussex. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, barcamp is an 'ad-hoc unconference': a whole weekend of talks provided by the participants themselves.

While watching a video about the UK Museums and the Web Mashup Day, I came across ManyEyes.

ManyEyes is an IBM service for data visualisation.

I just spotted Enkin.

As you can see from the video below, it's an Android application that combines Google Map data with GPS-and-compass positioning info, plus video footage from the phone's camera.

It's all very very clever. Three things to note about the cleverness:

1. In map mode, they use camera motion to drive the interface (i.e. no need for an accelerometer)
2.

Welcome once again to another spirited read-through of the screenplay that is the Cogapp internal blog. Let's kick off scene one with a mash-up.

These boots were made for walking
Spotted by Ian.

A fabulous Google Maps mash-up (what, another one?) which lets you plan and calculate a route on foot.