Just a quick test post using the new wordpress client for my Android phone.

This opens all kinds of new possibilities.

Konnichiwa. I have return from the Island Fortress Hideaway. It was very pleasant week all round.

For most of that week, I found myself writing a good few thousand words of a novel for NaNoWriMo. You can see my profile here. Add me as a writing buddy if you’re doing it too. I know, I am massively behind the word limit. But I think two good days and I’ll be back on top of it.

I may, at some point, start talking about it on here every once in a while. It is about museums and the future, after all.

I’ve neglected the various parts of the newcurator datashadow, so I’m probably going to be focussing on them for a while whilst I play catch-up. You can find me at:

Delicious – Where I throw the various articles that have caught my interest.

Tumblr – Mainly, something of a scrapbook for images. I don’t tend to reblog or use text that often, and I’ll follow back anyone who isn’t looking like a spambot. I think I’ve only blocked one person for being downright disgusting.

Twitter – My Almighty Pulpit to the Outside World. I’m over 2300 followers, almost at 2000 followings and rapidly approaching 2000 tweets. As for the dramatic difference in who I’ll follow back, it’s mainly down to the fact that I don’t have a clue who they are and what they do. I will always follow back any artist or museum worker. I’ve extended that pretty far to mean almost anyone associated to that realm. There’s a few culture magazines, many kinds of designer, plenty of freelancers and a variety of students in various states of graduation or employment. It would help if you told me if I should be following you. @ or DM me.

I still continue to block snake oil salesmen. I do love the “Report for Spam” button. I’ve also created a couple of lists, “Museums” will just be a short list of museums I’m trying to pay a large amount of attention to, and “Museum Shinobi”, which I hope will turn into a comprehensive list of people working within museums. I may make an “Artist” and a “Museopunk” list soon, but without a decent RSS feed on each list I’m in no rush to do it yet.

Facebook – This still doesn’t have a plan. It’s a great way of discovering artists though. I get a new one every day and I do like looking through their work. Otherwise, feel free to follow me. It seems to be used as an informal way to contact me. Not as official as a blog comment, not as direct as an email, not lost in the masses of a twitter response. I’m kinda happy with that.

Flickr – People make me a contact, I return the favour, the whole friends RSS feed going into my feed reader. So I see all. Otherwise, I don’t use it for much. When I use photos in blog posts (something I do rarely anymore) I look on Flickr and add them to my favourites. Otherwise, I don’t use it for much.

Last.fm – Haven’t listened to anything in ages. Will correct that today. Try to friend me on there if you like, but I will judge if I want your music in my Friends Playlist. Radio Newcurator is still plodding along. Someone keeps listening to a lot of 80s synth. The people in that group tend to know me in some form or we have something more than just a one-off contact. Don’t let that (or the 80s synth) put you off. Probably best to say if I know you on another network.

And of course, the Museopunk network. It’s been a bit quiet recently but I hope to kick it around a bit. Go join.

I’ve got a few things I need to do this week, including a much needed tidy-up of the top right of this site. Then I’m basically be off-grid for a week as I’m leaving the country for a week.

I will be handing the keys over to August for that time with the only instruction of “Go nuts”. Should be interesting.

It would also be really good if there were some guest posts just to keep things ticking over. I don’t like getting overly editorial, nor do they have to be very long.

As a set of guidelines, I like articles about the future of museums or strange underground movements in the museum world. I do like opinion pieces if they’re about a really interesting topic. I don’t exactly have a list of what I don’t want, apart from I try to avoid review-style posts.

Ideally, I need to get this all set-up and scheduled before I leave. Email pete(at)newcurator this week if you’re interested.

I’ve been missing for most of this week and what a week of problems it was.

First, tried to get this site working with Feedburner. Figured gaining a few pennies via the RSS feeds would be worth it. The plugin THEY recommended broke the entire site. Thanks to @ncartmuseum for coming up with a fix.

Secondly, was trying to experiment with Zotero to see if it can offer a new feature for newcurator. It seems the people who have managed to get Zotero to post a Wordpress post with every clipping are using some form of witchcraft. I wasted a day despite my best efforts.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I still can’t get my Delicious.com saved bookmarks into a daily post.

Thirdly, Wordpress pushed an update that cause catastrophic problems with my lovely theme. Literally, the whole thing went down. It makes you wonder that Wordpress, one of the biggest providers of blogging software, would tell people about the little changes that causes their plugins and themes to break everything in sight. Thanks to @firetail for this solution.

Lastly, I have had to do all this with a delightful sickness that made walking across the room a trial. So I was bedridden, wondering what I did for everything to crumble about my ears. Hence the lack of any serious amount of blogging. I’m feeling a little better now, but do plan to spend the weekend recovering and catching up.

Like this, something I wanted to do as soon as I heard: My thoughts go out to the friends and family of Officer Stephen Johns and everyone at the United States Holocaust Museum. I read this today from their twitter:

Despite our grief and outrage we reopen our doors today-June 12-and every day after with a renewed commitment to the urgency of our mission.

It’s been a tough week. My silly little grievances pale in comparison to the loss of a hero in the line of duty. This weekend, everyone take a moment, recuperate, reflect so we come back Monday better than ever…

Because of the urgency of our mission.

Last week, I made a call out for a web app coder/programmer. I know I was vague on details at the time because I hadn’t fully formed the idea.

I spoke to 8 people about it. 8 people have all rejected/pulled out for a variety of reasons.

So now, I’m going to describe the idea as best I can (remember, I am no programmer) and kick the idea out there to see what happens.

This idea/design/thing (and only this idea) is going under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence. This means I want you to share this idea, remix this idea, tell people where you got this idea (preferably a link), not to try to make money from this idea and give whatever you make from this a CC license as well.

The rest of this blog is under All Rights Reserved, Copyright, Voodoo Curses etc.

So I’ll begin.

MUSEUM BAILOUT

Through no previous planning or collaboration, both me and Nina Simon made a call for people to sign up to a Brooklyn Museum membership because of the recent news of them having quite a large budget cut. Turns out we made quite an impact. I saw that it was retweeted a lot. Which got me thinking. So much news about the doom and gloom of the financial state of museums, not much news about how we can fix it (bar wishing for handouts). Not many of us can conjure up several million to plug a hole in a museum budget. But several million of us could conjure up a little bit of cash that could go a long way to improving things.

This requires some activism. It requires a people-sponsored bailout of our museums.

At least this bailout won’t go into an undeserving executives bonus. Even better, you actually get something back! You get to be part of something and they give you stuff in return!

I notice how almost every museum has a membership program. I also notice how these are often tucked away in the corner of a website. I also notice there seems to be nothing anywhere looking like a directory of membership plans.

The Webapp would be a way to promote as many museum’s membership plans as possible in the simplest way. I think its better if I describe the process:

-A Museum Membership Officer (or similar) registers on the site.
-They are validated, probably through making sure the email is the museum’s own domain.
-The Museum then logs in, fills out a form of all their membership details. (name of member, length of time, costs, benefits etc) and links to website where you can sign up. This avoids the potential mess of trying to trying to mash together checkouts/credit cards/billing operations.
-Museum adds its location to a Google map.
-User goes to app, looks up town/city etc…
-User finds locations of nearest museum locations. 
-User clicks on museum location, brings up separate database entry (So the “map tag” is a link to something else, not having just text attached to the “map tag”. This is because more clever things may be required later)
-User looks at a Museum’s membership details. Clicks a link to Museum’s own membership website
-For the sake of analytics and maybe learning something from the numbers, the Museums get stats on how many people clicked their map tag, or looked at their membership plans, or clicked on the link to their own Museum’s website.
-User then signs “pledge” to promise to buy membership X from museum Y, using email and CAPTCHA as validation to avoid spam. This looks like a petition. Name, Email (not to be shown), age, location, drop-down menu of museums, then a secondary drop down menu of there different plans.
-This then forms a big list of people promising to buy a membership. “Jeff promises to buy an 1stfans membership from Brooklyn Museum” etc. I know this isn’t exactly accurate, but this way doesn’t require any linking to Museum’s own billing system and also doesn’t require the Museum to report back with confirmations (because they probably wouldn’t anyway). This is why we’re planning on tracking promises, not sales.
-User then gets little badge/widget saying that the are supporting the museum bailout with a membership X to museum Y. They can put this on their blog/myspace etc. This is to spread the word.
-Here’s a TRICKY BIT. There should be a big running totals/stats on the front of the app. A total of every “pledge”, so 10 people  promise to buy 10 memberships costing $100 each, there’s a thing on the front saying “Museum Bailout Total Promised $1000″ or something or “10 promises so far”. These number could possibly go onto the widget. Then there’s a big list of people’s promises.

That’s it. Essentially a big directory of museum membership information, a Google map, a widget and a petition. There’s a lot of scope of adding extras, like a delicious.com/digg feed of new reports on museums financial plight (to remind us why we’re doing this), or signing the pledge with a twitter account means (with your permission) you tweet “I will buy this membership” or something, or make the whole thing a facebook app.

Please, by all means spread this idea. Whilst I do want to hear from you if you plan to do something with it, please don’t email me saying “I’m interested in doing this” and then email me a bit later saying “Sorry, can’t do it”. If you’re serious, then I’m serious and will help any way I can and will blog the hell out of it (as will, I imagine, lots of others). In fact, contact me with something approaching a working beta. Put questions into the comments below.

I am, as always, reachable via pete(at)newcurator.com

As you may have noticed, newcurator was done for the best part of three days.

“Bandwidth Exceeded” is an odd badge of honour. It shows that a lot of people are interested and the numbers of readers are steadily growing.

The problem is that all this is coming out of my own pocket and I don’t get paid for this. The only income stream so far are the Google Ads and the bookshop. (Every Ad click make me happy. The bookshop may go as nobody uses it)

So when I’ve used up my monthly allowance, I’m not in a position to really put more money into upgrades. Not yet anyway.

So, thank you for being patient for my return and putting up with my abuse of twitter in that time.

Also, expect odd and curious ways that I’ll try to make this website pay for itself.

Newcurator.com t-shirts?

The video from the Museum Association sparked a huge response, partly as the Museum of Modern Art in New York asked it to their 3000 followers.

Here are the ones I’ve managed to collect.

Mine: To provide meaning.

Beth Dunn of Small Dots: To tell us our own stories, and the stories of others.

tahlib: The single most important function is to preserve cultural history.

Andreas Backoefer: Thinking about “ästhetische Autonomie” and create the “differánce”

Tiberious: preserving and displaying historical artifacts…as a means to educate the public and provide concrete truths about our history…

Krutcha: to advance progress through accumulating preserving sharing and passing by the creative knowledge to the future generations

RichardMcCoy: To provide first-hand experiences with cultural property.

Juliaxguila: To educate, challenge and inspire (also mentioned in the video). But I like @RichardMcCoy’s answer, too.

Margue: transmit and transform.

TheWomensMuseum: The single most important function of museums is to take content and present context that inspires and invites conversation

Paulastudio: to quench the thirst of souls and awaken the the parts of them that are asleep.

OhThatLaura: To enrich the lives of visitors through careful cultivation and presentation of works by different masters of artistry.

Lowconcept: Museums should strive to find the ideal balance between preservation for future generations and access for the current one.

stalyn: function is to inspire & educate. (yes really, it is that simple).

lauraah: To provide access and open eyes, to educate and foster discussion and opinion.

mjkopa: To create communities around historic and artistic objects.

Abi_Annette: to inspire understanding of our past and present.

LucieConnors: Make visitors think for themselves by creating thought provoking exhibitions, create a space for the circulation of ideas.

5easypieces: Museums should be a stage upon which a multiplicity of interactions can occur.

MattressFactory: to provide more questions than answers.

erickogelschatz: To inspire creativity

lauraloveslux: A museum’s most important function is to provide deep aesthetic respite & contemplative space to city dwellers.

chris_walsh: Museums have reponsibility to make preserved work available to the public; hopefully new media can further that mission!

rentonhistory: to document, preserve, and research, and *then* to engage the public in conversations informed by that work.

jeffrey_r: Preservation and access

• learnit: The story of Berlin museum is brilliant – and explains how printing money can lead to hyperinflation and Hitler.
• brooklynmuseum: Bklyn Bytes: from our collection online, tagged “over engineered”http://bit.ly/wWOP
• portableant: Just scared British Museum’s Bronze Age curator with what the new database can do for his research! Must be working well then!
• philamuseum: Load your iPod with some or all of our 379 tour stops bring them when you visit Tip: Same #s as our rental players http://tinyurl.com/7o4dwx
• giv_p: @richbs meh. it’s only a museum