Nina Simon over at Museum 2.0 invited me to write a guest post about our current photography experiment Oh Snap! and why I think it’s successful when most crowd-sourced exhibitions and photo-response projects fall flat.

Big thanks to Nina for allowing me to hijack her most wonderful site.

This is a sneak peak at a cool project I’m developing at work. We have an exhibition of recent photography acquisitions opening next month and we wanted to experiment with ways visitors (on-site and online) can participate with the works.

We’ll be inviting visitors to respond visually to the works hanging on the walls. They will be able to submit a photo from their mobile device or workstation, and then that image will be posted to the web as photo response. Taking it a bit further, the photos will be printed and then hung next to the work that inspired the derivative. Pretty cool.

The best projects are those that blur the line between digital and physical.

This is also the most elaborate responsive site I’ve built to date. I look forward to sharing it with you when it’s ready. More to come.

Suse Cairns expounds upon her most dangerous idea about museums in the coming year: The greatest threats to museums come from within. On the surface this statement may seem pessimistic, but I feel the best part of the essay comes when Suse highlights the positive potential for the sector moving forward:

This is what I believe. We, as a sector, are in a hugely opportune place right now. We are incredibly well connected to one another, and to ideas from within and external to our own profession. A real energy has started emanating at many of the conferences I’ve attended. We drink about museums together, we talk, we share, and we work.

Social media, conferences, and the generosity of the people who work within the sector make it ever easier to forge strong relationships beyond the walls of our institutions, and hopefully also within them, and to share knowledge and vision with one another. Indeed, they also ensure that there are more ways than ever to speak to our audiences and communities, to invite them to be a part of our vision too. And this all gives us a strong position to build from.

I couldn’t agree more. The astounding passion and creativity and genius of the museum professionals I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know just in the past several months is jaw-dropping.

However, Suse is right. Insularity is the antithesis of progress. We need to look outside of the museum fishbowl for inspiration, collaboration and corroboration if we are to truly effect positive change within the sector. Adapting to shifting environments — be they technological, artistic, cultural or economic — is crucial, and we need to be embracing the examples of our counterparts outside the cultural sector.

Alternatively, we should be telling the stories of our own institutions on more complex levels. We need to share not just our own work, but also the work of others in the sector. We should be remixing the work of others, both inside and outside of the sector, and allowing for others to remix our own work. Innovation comes from the open flow of information.

It’s a great time to be working in a museum. I look forward to sharing some exciting projects from my own institution, as well as others, in the coming year.

I struggle to understand the concept of the New Year’s Resolution. Every year, millions of people select an arbitrary date to start obsessively modifying lifelong behaviors and habits. They hedge their bets on a metaphorical flip of a switch and hope the current of willpower remains flowing in the face of temptation, vices and history.

Speaking from experience, it seems the game is rigged and the whole premise is setting us up for failure.

That said, the idea of personal development and productivity is near to my heart. Becoming better is something I think about daily. This year, however, instead of setting unrealistic goals to which I’ll fall short and, in turn, about which I’ll beat myself up, I’m identifying four focus areas of betterment in the coming year.

I am committed to fully pursuing these four directives in 2013 and beyond:

Be Here, Right Now

Pervasive technologies have their noted benefits, however they tend to take me out of the moment. They remove my focus from what’s right in front of me – the people I’m with and the tasks at hand. Starting today, I will make a conscious effort to remain present in the moment and dedicate my full attention to the people and things of importance before me.

This may involve disconnecting to an extent. Perhaps trimming the network. More appropriately, I think it may entail evaluating the limits and parameters to which platforms can claim my attention. Over the past few months, I’ve felt pulled apart by technology. Disjointed and off-kilter. I’ve made some small adjustments to address these issues, and will continue to modify this area of my life to reach a healthy balance.

Live Healthier

If we’re communicating freely here, I’ve let myself go in recent months. My hectic personal and professional schedules have all but eliminated any time for exercise or healthy eating. This needs to change. One year ago I was in the best shape of my life, on my way to running my first marathon. Then life took over and my health took a back seat to everything else.

I need to establish a system in which my personal health can assume a position of priority again. I have ideas about how this might be done and I’ll be enacting some of these tactics today. I’ll enact more tomorrow.

Create More

A few weeks ago after eating Chinese for lunch (see above), I received a fortune that read, “We are not here to merely exist. We are here to create.” Recently, my creativity has been exclusively professionally-channeled. The (lack of) activity on this site and the quiet end of the ZenGeek Podcast are a testament to that fact.

The fact is I’m extremely passionate about museums and technology. That won’t stop and I’m excited about a number of professional projects slated for 2013. I hope to infuse that passion into this site more than I have in the past.

I also believe creating outside of my professional track is very important. Creativity breeds more creativity. I hope to utilize my personal and professional creative streams to inform the other as a way of making new, interesting things.

Finish

Finally, I need to finish. I am an extremely great starter. I have some pretty good ideas and I start them with enormous enthusiasm and vigor. Just count the domains in my registrar account’s renew queue.

I am the worst finisher. Horrendous. Abysmal, even. I will work to change that in the coming year by saying “no” more than I have in the past and following through on these betterment focus areas.

I will track my progress throughout the year and measure my success. If you’re all open to it, I will share updates with you and perhaps dive a bit deeper into each of the four directives when the time is right and the data warrants it.

For now, though, I will enjoy a quiet end to this year. I will cherish the love of friends & family, and I’ll wake tomorrow ready to start attacking these goals. Happy New Year to you and yours.

I created my Flickr account in March of 2005. It was relatively early in the image sharing platform’s lifespan and right around the time Yahoo! paid big bucks to bring Flickr within its portfolio of web services. At that time, Flickr was a revolutionary tool primarily used by bloggers to host and share photos.

Over the years, Flickr’s feature set became more robust. A passionate community of users circled around the platform and I counted myself among them. They embraced the concept of user privacy and pushed forward with progressive copyright by integrating Creative Commons licensing in its nascent stages. Flickr was on top of the Web 2.0 world.

Then something happened. The web exploded with competing platforms that were focused on making it easier for users to share information. The iPhone was released and the mobile revolution was underway. “Social Media” had arrived and platforms were predicated on innovating at rapid rates.

Innovation at Flickr, however, ceased. Lured by compelling experiences and growing user bases elsewhere, many loyal Flickrists migrated away to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. The writing seemed to be on the wall for the once-great, now-stagnant service. Fearing the worst, I backed up my entire photostream and let my Pro Account expire in January of 2010.

I spent the next three years going about my business on the web without even a thought toward Flickr. Until this week when an update to Flickr for iOS was released to positive reviews.

Feeling nostalgic for my glory days of the web, I downloaded the app to see what all the fuss was about. And the fuss, in my opinion, is justified. With one fell swoop, Flickr has injected itself back into the conversation of web relevance. It’s not about the inclusion of Instagram-like photo filters or location services. Those features are great, but hardly leading edge. What makes this update so great is the combination of these features with a refreshed user experience, Flickr’s outstanding respect for its community of users and the promise of continued innovation from the platform.

This is all good news and exciting for someone who never really wanted to say goodbye. Needless to say, I’m back. It’s been great getting reacquainted with Flickr over the past few days and reconnecting with the community there. I’m curious to see where Flickr goes from here. New leadership at Yahoo! and a newfound energy are positive indications they’re moving in the right direction. That’s great to see.

Related: My friend Daniel Incandela’s take on the new Flickr

Joshua Gross exploring the idea that the future of the web is not in real-time information flow:

The real-time web is a bit like a fire hydrant—either the valve is opened or closed, but there’s no filter to stem the flow; we become the filter for the massive flow of information. Content should always feel like a gift, not a burden. To turn it into a gift, we need to start focusing on ways to control the flow.

Agreed. To me, the future of the web is a better filtering system — a way to dictate what, how and when desired information makes its way through input channels. The future has yet to be written, but I think it’s in making sure meaningful content gets where it’s supposed to go in a way that’s dictated by the user. The plumbing, if you will.

Timeliness is good, but timelessness, relevance and control are better.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about email. The majority of this recent writing has been about Google’s acquisition of Sparrow, a much-heralded Mac and iOS email client. Bloggers, tech pundits and average dudes are waxing philosophical about the health of the independent developer community, sustainable business models and the relevance of email itself. Good times.

There’s no denying that email is broken. Some are writing about its inherently flawed nature and obsoleteness, while others are making things in an attempt to fix it.

Spoiler: This post is also about email. It’s about email in its most basic state, irrespective of the client or vendor. It’s about potential. It’s about privacy. It’s about the promise of an agnostic platform in an age of proprietary prairies.

Let me explain.

For the past five years, I’ve been writing emails to my son. Shortly after he was born in 2007, I created an email account in his name so I could write to him throughout his childhood and then turn the account over to him when he was of age. Upon opening the account for the first time, he’d be greeted with an archive of his childhood as seen through his father’s eyes.

To date, I’ve sent him a wide array of messages ranging from short one-sentence emails just to let him know I love him to photos of special moments we’ve shared together to diary-like entries that chronicle his developments and our family’s journey together. Our daughter is due to arrive later next month, and I just created an account for her, now that we’ve decided on her name. I sent my first email to my unborn daughter last night.

Why Email?

So why email? Why not a private Facebook page or maybe a shared Evernote notebook? For me, the answers are simple. Ownership and privacy. I want to ensure ownership of the content stays with my children and that the content remains private. I’m talking about privacy in the simplest sense of the word here, not the kind of privacy networks like Facebook lead users to believe is the new standard.

Yes, I understand email can be hacked and messages can be leaked. I don’t believe total information security exists, so given the alternatives, email seems to be the least of all evils. Once content leaves our brains and becomes formalized in the ether, be it in a Moleskine journal or online, the concept of total and complete security flies out the window.

The idea here is that I want this content to exist for my kids in the long-term — when they turn 12 or 14 or 16 or whatever age is appropriate to start tooling around on the internet. Hell, my kids may look at email the way I looked at my Dad’s bell-bottoms when I was 14 and want no part of it. The point though, is that my notes will be available should they desire to access them. And I think they will. They’re good kids.

A lot of users are placing a lot of faith in Facebook and Twitter and Squarespace at the moment, but who ultimately owns the content published on those respective platforms and where will that record of life moments be in five, fifteen or twenty-five years? I’d wager that email will still be around in some form. Facebook? Not so much. Good luck exporting that content from a walled garden.

For all the flack email has been receiving lately, its value is proven. Sure, it’s a pain to manage professionally and inboxes are exploding with spam and bacn for many. Efficiently managed, though, email can be a beautiful thing. Email can be a living portal to years of moments — all indexed, timestamped and contextual.

Dude’s Day

I took my son to a local amusement park the other day. Just the two of us on a “Dude’s Day,” as we like to call these excursions. The amusement park was hosting a Superhero meet-and-greet, where kids could meet Spiderman, Hulk, Thor and Captain America. My son is a huge superhero fan, so he was naturally excited. We were both looking forward to this time together for days leading up to the event.

What surprised me, though, was this: As we waited in line to meet the first hero, he asked if I could take his picture and send it to his email. In that moment I realized that he understands what I’m doing and wants to be a part of it. He’s excited and eager to have access to these notes down the road. I think that’s super cool and it makes my effort worthwile.

Email isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But in this instant, and for this purpose, it’s the most appropriate tool for the job.

Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica on Google’s acquisition of Sparrow:

Like most Sparrow users, the news caught me off-guard; the application had recently been updated in Apple’s App Store, and the latest version had widened its performance lead on Apple’s Mail.app and other Mac OS mail software. But the update turned out to be a final act instead of a prelude to something bigger—and the bow was an undisclosed payday for Leca and Kima Ventures, the French venture capital team that originally backed the company. This is the sort of exit that’s become common to software and Web companies in the current economy, where the only way to get the big payout is to be acquired by a Google, or a Facebook, a Microsoft or an Apple.

I use Sparrow on my desktop and iOS. I absolutely love the application. Sparrow makes email bearable for me, so this is naturally disappointing news.

It’s hard to fault Dom Leca and the Sparrow development team for making the choice to sell out, just as it’s hard to question the decision of Instagram brass to be absorbed into Facebook. What’s disturbing to me, though, is the unstable user environment created by such acquisitions.

I expect such developments when dealing in free apps and lottery ticket business models. It’s harder to stomach when it happens to a shop generating healthy revenue under a viable business strategy. No one saw this one coming.

If we learn one thing from the Facebook – Instagram merger, it should be that we are all for sale and there is no such thing as FREE. These services we use every day are not free services. When we do not directly pay for a service with real money, we pay for it with our data. We pay for it when we broadcast our location, social graph and our status updates.

In the case of yesterday’s acquisition, we are the product being sold.

Facebookization of the masses has caused a morphing of social norms where sharing has become the default. This is obvious to many, but it doesn’t have to be the reality. In order for real change to take place, the curtain of “free service culture” must be lifted through a tipping point of user awareness.

Let’s Break It Down

We are all for sale. Just yesterday, I and 30 million other users were sold for about $33.00 each – a brilliant move for the Instagram folks. Regardless of whether or not this was a smart and strategic business move for Facebook, the reality is this: The images, location data and platform activity of all current and future Instagram users now have a new owner. This new owner happens to be a company I do not personally trust. Therefore, my user account and data are no more.

Maybe you’re completely comfortable with this acquisition. Maybe you don’t care. That’s fine, but you should at least be aware of what’s happening with your data. Often times, the concept of faux-free overshadows the reality that these services are profiting from our activity. While it is the nature of our times and it’s not going away, it should be out in the open.

High profile deals like the Facebook/Instagram acquisition can help with awareness, but with payoffs north of nine zeros they can also create an environment of copycat strategies. How many social startups now have the goal of becoming the next Instagram?

A Plea to Developers

I loved Instagram. The application lived in prominence on my Home Screen. I wrote about how it supplanted the native camera on my phone and I would have happily paid for the service. I’d wager a good portion of the user base, in some capacity, would have as well.

Developers of the next Instagram: please give users the opportunity to directly support your service by paying for it! Please take our money! Please have a sustainable business plan, or better yet, a platform philosophy!

Some platforms are doing it and it’s working. Look at Pinboard. Look at 500pixels. Look at Instapaper. All thriving with a paying user base. It’s time for us, as empowered users of technology, to start following the money.

The Instagram team would have been foolish to turn down a billion dollars. People play the Mega Millions for a reason. They play for a chance to win big. And winning big is a very rare occurrence. Facebook offer removed, Instagram could have leveraged their active user base to earn millions of dollars year over year had they pursued a sustainable revenue stream.

A lottery ticket is not a sustainable business practice.