ArtBabble
Posted in Museum Expansionism, Technology on 25. Feb, 2009
Thanks to Tyler Green for giving me the invite to ArtBabble.org, Indianapolis Museum of Art’s project.
On first impression, it seems like a re-skinned art channel on YouTube or Vimeo. Then you see that all the videos come directly from institutions (at the moment, IMA). In this 2.0 world, its good to see the user relegated to the role of viewer, but one who can comment and still have the social experience with other users. The creation of content is left to the professionals so everything is good rather than having to wade through rubbish to get to it .
The other thing is that it works. Yes, it’s still in beta (what isn’t?) so I imagine the categorisation will continue to be built, but the FLV player is just a delight compared to others. Skipping around is easy, sharing and embedding is easy, watching the video is just easy and therefore enjoyable. Creative Commons licensing, mp4 (iPod) downloads and transcripts make this very special. The design of the site is just so damn pretty. You get the idea this is a social-video site with the intention of a professional resource as well as expanding museums.
As I spend the rest of my evening watching things, I leave you with something I found: Hirokazu Kosaka’s Calligraphy Demonstration. Perfect viewing for an already hard week.
Babble On.
QUICK ADDITION: You can’t see it on the embedded video, but when watching the video on the ArtBabble, the video playback bar along the bottom has blue lines over it. At first, I thought this was for subtitles. I’ve just noticed that when the video moves over these blue lines, there’s a menu to the right that you can open up and be given more information. Like the above video has lots of pages that link to other calligraphy-related content, like collections, other videos, pictures of objects etc.
THAT’S DAMN CLEVER.
Pete – thanks so much for the kind review. It’s been a lot of work by the IMA involving staff from a variety of departments, but we’re thrilled with the current version of ArtBabble. We’re working hard behind the scenes to add new content from other museums and to continue adding lots of our own videos. So, it is in beta right now, but we hope to change that very soon. Babble On.
Interesting. I’ll go back and take another look. But there was a lot of buzz about this “site” and when I got there I actually wondered why.I realize that a beta is a work in progress but it doesn’t rock the boat.Looking for something to rock the boat. There are plenty of these kind of delivery systems out there to take the best attributes and run with them.Don’t see that at artbabble. Don’t really understand what the goals are.