@Pete What have you proved? You’ve made a Google Co-op search for the 9 institutions websites (whole website, not specifically their collections). You’ve suggested people use disparate bookmarking tools to save them, or use disparate social networking sites to do the social bit? Sorry, try again :-)

@Andrew But the site does do something, surely? I don’t really want to always be on the defence of CS, and there’s so much to this debate! The site seems to do something for me. I like the idea of the notebooks – it’s like a Tumblr style app in a museum/gallery space. Ticks a box for me. I like the groups idea. Maybe that’s too fluffy for some, but I think it’s a good idea. I just wish there were feeds for everything (and of course, an API).

@Frankie Yes – the URLs are weird. I hope they sort that. It should be simple enough on a LAMP stack, but it looks Windows-ish to me.

I wonder which URL Google will consider the canonical one…

It doesn’t actually appear to *do* much apart from provide some social bookmarking features. Any ideas as to how this budget was spent? In terms of actual functionality, £150k seems generous for a site like this.

As I proved, you could do it all on Google.

http://newcurator.com/2009/03/how-to-make-creative-spaces-in-5-minutes/

‘beta’ as final bug fixes is a slightly outdated idea that doesn’t allow for open iterations – having a beta like this is a step closer to an agile model that allows for deep change, not just a thin layer of beta testing that can only poke around on the surface or fix bugs.

I dunno, I’m still thinking through it all. Museum projects need to be more user-centred, and this is both a step forward (even if the geeks have trouble imagining it being useful for other people) and a step backwards (because it’s the same old top-heavy, old-fashioned project structure based around institutional needs).

Thanks for your comment.

It’s true that each museum could do the same on their own sites, but that’s limiting when you want to view collections beyond the bounds of a single institution. Many people may also visit a number of museums in one day, or over time, and want to aggregate stuff together. Not just saving favourite objects, but photos, text, whatever. A more reflexive approach, as it where. That’s how I see it anyway.

True – much of the functionality could be created in Ning in a few hours. But who has control over that data? How safe would it be with Ning? How could you get data back out in a useable, controlled form? How can you control how well it will perform if the service gets very popular? You couldn’t do the federated search in Ning.

There are a lot of improvements to be made, that’s for sure. I’ve just uploaded some images into a Notebook and it looks rather ugly (especially how it shows the larger image). But I expect that kind of thing to change from user feedback. Or at least, I hope it will ;-)

I do think that it’s newsworthy, as it is a start. I haven’t seen anything directly museum/gallery-related like this before. I only hope that there is some of the £1.5m left to make improvements, and that some of the constructive criticism levied by members of the museum community (and indeed, early users) will be taken onboard.

We will have to, as they say, watch this Creative Space (har, har).

In fact, I think this could be knocked up in ning.com in an afternoon.

Alright, it’s still in Beta. But Beta is supposed to show a rough version with bugs to iron out. Not something so thin it’s not going to tell you where it’s going.

When something worth mentioning happens on Creative Spaces, I’ll talk about it. But think about the fanfare this has got. This has been released far too early.