One of the challenges of our Museum Without Walls project is how to gather, a critical mass of location-based multimedia material that’s worth seeing.

MIT has its own video gateway site that links to three major MIT video repositories: TechTV, where the community can upload videos; MITWorld, videos of lectures and events at MIT; and MITOpenCourseWare, videos of classroom lectures.

But the fact remains that someone has to produce the videos. So far, iMovie and its cousins have done a lot to bring video production to a huge base of people, but I would wager that a large percentage of the storytelling being done with those tools is from the point of view of a single voice.

However, Wikimedia and Kaltura have teamed up to start a site where multiple people can collaborate on video production. (Seen at boingboing). Overall, a very cool idea with a lot of promise!

One thing I didn’t buy yesterday was a MacBook Air. I went to the Chestnut Hill Mall Apple store to see what it looked like but they didn’t have any to show. The store won’t have any to look at for two more weeks.

Instead I ordered a MacBook from the Apple Education for MIT site (they are about $100 less there, and there’s a savings on AppleCare). When it gets here in a few days, I’ll clone my MacBook Pro’s hard drive to the MacBook and send the MBP to my son. They only thing I’ll miss, I suspect is the lighted keyboard, something I’ve come to like a lot. I ordered the 250GB drive and I’ll shop around for a RAM upgrade.

Then, with the savings, I’m thinking pretty seriously about an iPhone, something that would be fun to play with for the Museum Without Walls.

The iPhones I looked at at the Apple store had the new location detection firmware. The store is here but the phone indicated it was a good 1000′ southeast of the store, south of what’s labeled Holyhood Cemetery. That’s not exactly pinpoint accuracy. But the Skyhook wifi database may not have included the mall, and thus the iPhone was probably using the Google cell-tower locations to find itself. Skyhook claims 10-20m accuracy in urban areas. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

So I’m going to blame my recent lack of postings on my blog to the fact that, like Hobu, I was finding that a Plone-based blog was not so easy to deal with. I decided to jump into the blogging mainstream with WordPress, so here we go.

Along with the switch to WordPress, I’m going to expand from mostly geo-related topics to things I’m dealing with at MIT as well. So for those of you who want exclusively geo-news, link to the geo category and the geo feed in Atom, RSS, or RSS2.

I still have to switch over the Feedburner feeds and tweak a few more bits and pieces, but overall the new version is ready to go.

As I mention in the About page, I’ve kept the old blog intact so that all the permalinks still work.