I just come back from Museums and the Web 2009 in which I have presented a paper written together with Joanna Saad-Sulonen and Lily Díaz. In this article we compare the use of Urban Mediator in Kiasma (A museum on contemporary art in Helsinki) and ImaNote in Design Museum Helsinki.
The paper is: Using On-Line Maps for Community Generated Content in Museums and the presentation is also available from the Conference website.

In a previous version of the same conference we published a paper that tells about our experience using ImaNote to gather visitors-generated content in Kunsthall (Taidehalli). This paper is: Visitors’ Voices.

Forthcoming is a paper accepted for publication in Nordes (Nordic Design Research Conference) about “Customizing an Annotation Tool for Museum Community Generated Content”.

In the Exhibition: “The Secret Life of Objects, an Interactive Map of Finnish Design”
(18.3. – 1.6.2008) we have implemented an instance of ImaNote to gathered visitors’ and staff’s stories, opinions, jokes and questions. Through the interactive map visitors could give their comments about the objects and enjoy comments that were left by other visitors.

We organized workshops in which teenagers and children were invited to work with design objects using music, poetry, photography and drawing. Audio-visual materials gathered in the workshops were accessible in the exhibition and on-line through the interactive map and the blog .
Visitors could comment on the historical material related to the objects, on the material coming from the workshops, on the objects of the exhibition, on other visitors’ comments, on the exhibition as a whole, and on the future design.

The project “The Secret Life of Objects”, was done in collaboration between Design Museum and Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki. An abstract of this project was published in the Compilation of cultural accessibility projects. European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. April 2008, Turku, Finland.

So, after all these months, here it is! We hope that you enjoy using it.
- SysRep group at Media Lab

This is basically a bugfix release, though experimental support for importing/exporting annotations is also added. Go get it from the download page.

We’re hoping to release 1.0 by the end of the year, so stay tuned.

A new version of ImaNote is now available. The new release corrects some
problems of the previous version and contains several improvements such
as a redesigned, cleaner and simpler user interface. Other improvements
include user groups, password resetting, annotation icons, etc.

You can get it from the download page. Please, try it out, give
us your feedback and report bugs.

Frappr! is an online service to make maps (uses Google maps) for groups. In to the group’s map people may then add where they are located at or where do they come from.

In the EU e-Learning 2006 conference the Frappr! is used for pointing out who are the conference participants and where do they come from. it works very well and is very nice way to get participants to know a bit more about each other.

But if you want to have “conference participant map” on your own site you may conside to usse ImaNote. Why not just use the Frappr!? You may not trust that the nice guys in the company behind the Frappr and Google will offer you the service for ever for free. You may keep some ownership on your things. if yes – Imanote is here.

We, Lily Díaz Kommonen and Mariana Salgado, wrote a paper about the experience of using ImaNote in Taidehalli (Helsinki Art Museum) during the Young Artists’ Biennale: Small Heaven. The exhibition took place in November 2005.
In this trial we were gathering comments related to the whole exhibition and to some pieces in the museum.

We will present the paper in the conference Museums and the Web 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA this month.

See: Visitors’ voices

I wrote today a “user story” about Imanote features inside Fle3’s Knowledge Building tool. The user story is available in the Savannah of the Fle3-project.

The Imanote development as an independent application for image annotation continues as well. The tasks are listed in the Savannah of the Imanote project.

New people to the development teams of both projects are welcome. Please contact us!

Another map annotation tool and research project:

Stamps

The work is partly done in a context of learning – even computer supported collaborative learning. There is a PC client and client for Symbian – I am not sure if the Symbian client already exist. The features are very similar to ImaNote, but it is not web-based, either FLOSS. I am also not sure if you can use whatever image as the “map” that will be annotatated, or have layers of images in there – like with ImaNote.

The links between the annotations makes the view more like a “discussion map”. Have a look of the ShoutSpace client interface scrteenshot. The link is created when a new annotation is a reply to some earlier one and then draged to some other location.

Another nice map service with some similarities with ImaNote.

http://www.frappr.com/

Frappr works with the Google Maps API, so you can add annotations to any location in the world – well actually you are adding annotations to the “world” as Google represents it. I like Frappr, but still I would stand up for ImaNote.

Imanoote is different. It is different because it is open. The openness gives the power for the people. ImaNote is open in many ways. You set-up your own service; you choose what kind of images will be annotated in your service; you invite your friends or colleagues to use the service (or simply let anyone to use it). And if there is someone who do not like how things are in your service she may start her own service.

To make ImaNote available for those who do not have their own web-server, there should be website / portal that is offering it as a service. Then anyone could add images for annotation and make groups around them. Anyone interested in?