There in more than just spirit

As long as I’m stuck in the airport waiting to head to Museums and the Web 2008 instead of actually, you know, attending it, I should mention something that makes the situation slightly more bearable: OneTag.

It’s the innovation of a guy from the UK named Mike Ellis who edits the Electronic Museum blog, and it’s actually a pretty simple idea (although he says it’s a dog to program, and I believe him — I certainly wouldn’t know where to start). Essentially, everyone attending a conference or event tags all of their blog posts, Flickr photos, Twitter updates, etc., with a single shared tag. In the case of Museums and the Web, it’s mw2008.

Then all of those posts, photos, updates, etc., can be conglomerated together into one feed, so that everyone attending the conference can keep track of what everyone else at the conference is seeing, learning, thinking about having for dinner, etc.

In other words, I blog it here, tag it with mw2008, and it shows up there. They’re showing the feed on a big screen in the main room right now, and I’m able to watch it on my computer. It’s so meta that it’s making my head hurt.

This is a particularly fitting idea for a conference that’s devoted to the best ways to use the Web for education, sharing ideas, getting people involved with museums and the like. I may not be there in person yet, but I’m already a part of it, just by writing this post and tagging it the correct way.

Freaky, huh?

Tags: communications, mw2008