Merry Christmas everyone

How is it that as the Christmas break approaches, the list of everything you want to achieve grows and grows and yet you know from past experience that the time available will dwindle on a daily basis as family demands on your time increase with every second?
Every year I forget that I cannot possibly do everything. All good intentions of replying to emails, reading journals, building the EndNote library of references, writing blogs, project managing the year ahead, chatting on MSN, building virtual abbeys and revising software are buried by house and family matters. For instance, the weekend before last, the conservatory wood burner blows a gasket and the whole of the ground floor is covered in a gritty film of soot. Precious moments are spent washing every ornament, surface, conservatory white work and glass instead of sitting comfortably and cosy studying away in front of said fire. Suffice to say, I am now behind all my intentions big time.

Today has been good, all day spent on spreadsheets and time management for possible projects. Between Mike and myself, there has grown quite a list of suggested opportunities for a Talking Walls (TW) application, and over the year we have noticed that some have been slipping by and have run the risk of being forgotten. These are now all nicely listed with contacts researched complete with numbers and addresses.

The highest priority currently is making sure the Micro Project funding application is finally vetted, printed, bound and submitted. This will be to Finance South East for a TW application based on Beaulieu Abbey and the Cistercian monks that lived there. Should the funding application be successful, it will be a busy 7 months creating the software and then we will at long last have a full working application in place for other interested parties to view, test and use.

With regards to the PhD, it has been extremely interesting to note the increase in papers and research on interactive multimedia tours since 2003. Whilst still studying for my Masters, I read a few papers looking at the visitor experience, one in particular mentioning an electronic guide book prototype and a study of it's use (The Guidebook, the Friend, and the Room: Visitor Experience in a Historic House - A. Woodruff, P. M. Aoki, A. Hurst, and M. H. Szymanski 2001). There were not many papers on this area that I could find then and most were based in America. In 2002-2003, the Tate Modern ran pilot tours using a PDA and a 'location-sensitive wireless network' (Tate Modern Multimedia Tour Evaluation, S. Fisher, 2002), at the same time, an interactive multimedia tour at the Natural History Museum was implemented by Alisa Barry, Head of Interactive Media at the museum. As time has passed more and more museums, galleries and heritage sites are looking into enhancing the visitors' experience, and finding ways to encourage more people to visit.

What has not been available is the technology we have now and it's accessibility. We also now have a generation that has grown up with computers and expect instant access to information and entertainment. They are able to create their own online entertainment and social networks and provide entertainment for others via sites such as 'YouTube', sharing and re-purposing content. This is such a vast change from when I first started the Dunster Castle multimedia 'Talking Walls' project in 1995, and yet with a re-work of the interface and more importantly the navigation, it has become suitable for mobile, web, DVD, kiosk or TV. More importantly still, the content is being designed for visitors / users to create their own chunks of information which they can explore in situ and continue at home.

This area is really the basis of the PhD - so if you have any comments / feedback on multimedia tours you have experienced recently, I would love to hear from you.

Merry Christmas and have a Happy Prosperous New Year - with heaps of time.