Win Free Movie Tickets in The C&G Photo Contest

Look for the camera icon in your Twitter app (indicated by
the red arrow in the screen shot above) to add a
photo to your tweet.

The Clay & Glass is holding a contest for the most popular photos taken at the Gallery.

You enter using Twitter. Here's how it works.

Use your smartphone to take a picture at the Clay & Glass. Then attach it to a tweet that contains the hashtag #clayandglassphoto. Here's how it might look:

"Check out this great photo I took at the Clay & Glass #clayandglassphoto"

To add the photo, look for the little camera icon (marked by a red arrow that has been added to the screenshot to the right). That will give you the option to take a new photo on the spot or choose one from your saved photos.

Then when you send the tweet, the photo will be attached and can be seen by anyone who wants to look.

Here's what happens next...

The gallery re-posts your photo on their FACEBOOK PAGE (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Canadian-Clay-and-Glass-Gallery/190913524282373). You should visit that page, 'Like' it, and then ask your friends to go there too and 'Like' your photo.

The first contest ends on January 31st, 2013. The photo tweeted during the last three months with the most 'Likes' will win the movie tickets.

Try it! It's easy. And you could be the next winner.

Now it's BYOD at The Clay & Glass

What's The Clay & Glass - why that's the new, shorter, easier to remember name for the prestigious Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery located in Waterloo, Ontario.

And what's BYOD? Well that stands for bring your own device - like smartphones, tablets, etc. They'll all work with the new initiative at the Clay & Glass.

The Gallery has just opened a fascinating new exhibition called ART-O-MATIC: Art Meets New Technologies. So you can see that they are starting to explore the creative fireworks that are going on at the zone where art and technology intersect. Just to make sure that everything clay and glass is completely up-to-date, they launched the BYOD program at the same time.

Yes, the Clay and Glass is now mobile friendly. They even have local wi-fi, in case you're bringing a web-enabled device, like the Apple iPod Touch with no phone connection.

Here are some things you can do with your smartphone at the Clay & Glass:

1. Take the smartphone, self-guided tour of the gallery. It's free. There are three parts to the tour, so you can learn all about the unique architecture of this award-winning building, find your way around in the gallery spaces inside, or take a quick look at some of the one-of-a-kind glass and ceramic art gifts in the Gallery Shop. There's a floor plan too. Scan the code to the right with a QR code scanner app on your smartphone to take the tour right now.

2. Check in with Foursquare. The Clay and Glass is a prominent Foursquare stop in Waterloo. Be sure to check in when you visit the gallery and add to your art critic score.

3. There's a great new photo contest you can enter using Twitter. Take a photo at the Clay & Glass and post it with a tweet containing the hashtag, #clayandglassphoto  -  You could win a pair of movie tickets!

 Learn more HERE

Keep it up, Clay & Glass. You're on your way to becoming a leader in technology and the arts.

A Word cloud from Museums and the Web 2012

I'm still fascinated by these word clouds. What they reveal about the focus of an initiative, as evidenced by its texts, is impressive.

The 2012 version of the Museums and the Web conference is running in San Diego this week. Fortunately for those of us who can't be there, the text of many of the presentations has already been posted online. The word cloud above was created by amalgamating the contents of a number of these presentations.

Here you can get a glimpse of what will be occupying the minds and the discussions of those attending the conference. The substance is significant.

When this conference first started, in the neighbourhood of 15 (+/-) years ago, I recall that the buzz was all about websites. Wonderful to see how things have evolved. This week the topic of websites is still present, but is now far overshadowed by terms like digital, mobile, strategy, AR, information, data, media, smartphone, app, social and experience.  Great to see that museums and their visitors, however, are still the central focus.

A Word Cloud from the #musesocial Tweet-up

Here's a word cloud from the tweet-up I described yesterday. Because of the way Twitter operates, a text analysis tends to emphasize the presenters rather than the content of their posts.

But this still represents a great tribute to the diversity of those participating.

A Tweet-up About Musems and Social Media

Screen shot of Twitterfall from Wikimedia Commons

My first tweet-up today, and I'm pretty stoked about it.

This is an event where a particular hash-tag is chosen, and then a large group of people tweet during a pre-determined time period using that hash-tag. The result is a long-distance, transcontinental dialogue, broken up into 140-character messages. Brilliant!

This one was about museums and social media (= social networking) and the hashtag was #musesocial.

Ideas are exchanged, arguments ensue, explanations are made, questions are asked and suggestions are offered. A lot of learning takes place.

It isn't easy to get the hang of this, of course. Over the space of five hours or 300 minutes, I counted over 1200 on-topic tweets. That's about 4 tweets a minute or one every 15 seconds. And they can come in clusters, so it's challenging to keep up. If you stop to compose an answer to someone you can get lost in a hurry.

I first tried following the action with my normal Twitter feed, but that didn't work because there were lots of people participating who I don't already follow. Then I tried a Twitter search for the hash-tag du jour, but all I got was an out-of-sequence and way-behind series of tweets that could not be used to participate.

My salvation was a nice website called  twitterfall.com. They allow you to search on a particular hash-tag and then deliver a chronologically sequential stream of up-to-the-minute tweets. You can pause the stream if you want, and it pauses automatically if you choose one of the tweets to respond to.

An exhilarating experience of high-octane communication.

Hello World!

This is the first.

I'm getting excited about blogging.

The sky's the limit (I'm not excited about cliches, but they don't bother all that much me).

Use the language of the people! Today I saw an ad on the back of a bus that said, "We got you covered."