Here in Washington DC the Smithsonian Museum of American Art is reopening tomorrow after a six-and-a-half year "top to bottom overhaul".

While it was closed, SAAM launched an interesting experiment, a blog called "Eye Level" in September, stating that its "...fundamental goal is to foster conversation and debate about American art."

Michael Edson of SAAM spoke about the blog at a recent conference. talking about how the blog was a bit of a hard sell to SAAM managers who were more traditional in their view of public outreach. But Michael said the blog team successfully made the case that the blog would be an easy way to publish conversational notes about the museum and its collection and to engage the public in the run-up to the reopening. (They also implemented a pretty careful writing/review policy, however casual the posts do look!)

What I think is interesting is how the blog functions to showcase SAAM's vast collection - pulling out selected pieces, exposing them to the public eye, telling the stories of the pieces and the artists, and making them relevant to current times and themes. I think this approach makes a vast archive more penetrable - and should be valuable for a museum or library or knowledge collection whether the physical facility is closed for 6.5 years or not.

Some examples of the Eye Level posts on various topics include baseball, the passing of artist Luis Jiménez and the 300 hour process of installing the amazing James Hampton's Throne for the impending opening.

Hats off to Michael and the SAAM Eye Level team.


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I like online "dashboards" which give a snapshot of real-time critical operational information. Dashboards have been fairly common for network-based business process management software, but as more organizations put operational data and services on the web, there will be new opportunities to create dashboard views to aid the management of web-based business operations. We've helped clients in the "intellectual commerce" business design dashboards to collect and display "web performance metrics" such as usage by key audiences, online prominence, outreach effectiveness, and others.

For a great example of an online dashboard on something really important check out the below example from the BBC for WorldCup 2006 games - here showing the Brazil-Ghana game at the break. This gives a one-screen overview of key data like yellow cards issues (too many!), % possession, shots on or off goal etc. The stats at the break looked like Ghana was still competitive, alas. This is a time-critical information service that we all need at our fingertips in the coming weeks(!)



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