Museum websites? Saai man…

q42nl:

Al sinds 2004 zijn wij, in samenwerking met onze vrienden van Fabrique, verantwoordelijk voor de website van een van Nederland’s mooiste en best bezochte musea: het Rijksmuseum. Hoewel de oude website door velen nog altijd werd gezien als een van de betere museumwebsites wereldwijd, werd het stiekem toch wel tijd voor een nieuw jasje. De jarenlange renovatie van het museum is nu echt bijna voltooid en onlangs werd er ook een nieuwe huisstijl gelanceerd. Een goed moment om ook online de boel eens goed onder handen te nemen.

We voelen Jasper Kaizer, verantwoordelijk voor de projectleiding aan Q kant, aan de tand over de bijzonderheden van dit project.

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20blinks: save and share your life with friends in a visual way

Last weekend a big update of 20blinks went live and I am very curious to see how this will be adopted.

What is 20blinks? 

It is a social sharing site that allows you to create 20 collections of your 20 best-loved, favorite items. An expression of yourself as they say. In 20blinks you create collections of  music, video, books AND websites. The founders and their friends realized that they did not have a place online to share their best-loved items and keep them there for a longer time. Upon this need they started off building this site. Initially it lauched in the spring of 2010 for a limited audience. Based on the experiences of the first few months, we worked on the update that was launched last week.

The cool thing is that unlinke other sharing sites, you are not limited to just books or videos but you can create collections of any type. Furthermore, the collections are displayed in a  visual very appealing way. Check some of these collections: Retro Hats, HOT SAUCES, Places-to-go, Roeland’s best album covers.

20blinks is founded by Bas Zwaan and Sandra Hay. They run the site from their habitat in Curacao. My friends at Freshbits are doing the development from Amsterdam.

I’ve been involved in the design and implementation of the facebook app and general concepting for the next steps. 

Go and give it a try!

A linguistics professor was lecturing to her class one day. “In English,” she said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah …right.”

— online

Bib.fm: music discovery and streaming with your library

Search for music and stream it in the browser at your library website. That is now possible at the public library of Lanaken in Belgium. The Flemish agency for digital libraries Bibnet partnered with Aristo Music to create this new environment. I was involved with the design and development.

You’ve probably seen the computers that are being used in bars in restaurant to select and play music. Aristo is one of the companies that builds those and provide the service. In order to operate that service, they have a large collection of digital music that is enriched with great metadata. A team of people annotate songs with information like mood, vocals, instruments, speed, etc. This allows for easy play list selections in bars and restaurants. For example, if you want to play  only instrumental music with a slow pace  the next hour, this is a very easy selection of just a few clicks.

On top of all the great metadata, they have some cool algorithms in use to suggest similar songs to the song  you are listening to. And that allows for great serendipitous discovery.     

Aristo also operates the Tunify web service which is a subscription based music streaming offering. 

In the Bib.fm project Aristo’s metadata and services are combined with the public library offerings.

The metadata is used to enrich the catalog data of OpenVlacc, the Belgian national catalog for public libraries. This bag of data is is indexed in one aquabrowser search engine for some great discovery. All of a sudden you the strengths of two data sources come together: the high quality catalog metadata and the more emotional/sentiment metadata from Aristo.

All the tracks that are digitized can be played right there inside the web site. If you are a registered patron of the library you can play full songs and everyone else can play 30 second clips of each song. 

Check out the site at http://lanaken.bib.fm. For example do a search on u2.

A couple of notes:

• The service is in Dutch, but you can probably still figure it out if you’re not Dutch speaking. The language of Music is universal right?
• The player is flash based so don’t bother trying this on your iOS device.
• For more info on this project see http://lanaken.bib.fm/over 

Update:

There were several parties involved in this project. For proper credits I list them here:

• Bibnet: idea, project management, making it happen
• Public Library of Lanaken: the pilot library, taking the risk in applying this.
• Wieni: Drupal CMS and webdesign for frontpage window inviting users to start exploring
• Libis: authentication service and javascript
• Serials Solutions Medialab: the aquabrowser discovery layer
• Aristo Music: providing the data, streaming and created the player
• JK FWD: product design and development from the start of the project; putting it all together.

For me, eating cookies more than obsession: it lifestyle.

— Cookie Monster

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“De afspraak”

Even before antennagate earlier this summer all of us are suffering from dropped connections every now and then. This can be due to the phone company, phone, driving into a tunnel or you pretending to loose your connection.

I suffer mostly from dropped calls when I am in the hi speed train between Amsterdam and Brussels. I did not bother yet to find out who’s fault that is (my provider, my phone, my seat in the train). It is a fact that while I am losing my calls I see others calling uninterrupted during the whole ride.

Apparently with these iphone4 models more and more people are suffering the dropped call issue. Luckily there is already a great working protocol, de afspraak, how to handle these situations. Or call it a social contract. But, I noticed that many people do not know about this causing lots of calling frustration. So for everyone as a reminder:

The person that initiated the call is responsible to call back after the connection is lost.

This is a very simple rule that just works and avoid both parties calling each other at the same time only to get their voice mail. It is that easy.

Another passionate promotor of de afspraak is my friend Taco. We’ve made many aware of this together.

Starting up…

Yes! As of today I am independent and available for hire. This site is of course very much under construction, but the contact page works so you know how to reach me. Of course, soon more to follow and some decent content here. Stay tuned.