Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Around March my car started running rather roughly – then it stopped running altogether. Since I’ve been jetting around to conferences I wasn’t able to get it looked at until today. Apparently the culprit was not any mechanical failure caused by deferred maintenance. No. instead:

Mice.

Chewing on my wires.

Apparently the voracious bastards chewed through the wires connecting the engine to the onboard computer. I know the first thing to do whenever you’re having PC problems is “check the cables.” Now I really wished I had called Click’n'Clack.

Anyone have an outside cat I can borrow?

I was reading a DLib article about the Asset Actions Experiment that was conducted here at the University of Illinois with several other CIC members (it was actually going on a few steps from my old desk.). To enable annotations of images, they lifted the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) image schema.

Several museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum have created MySpace pages, Picture Australia and Brooklyn have leveraged and I’m a member of the Spurlock Museum‘s Facebook group.

A variety of web services, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. or popular blogs such BoingBoing make it easy for me to associate myself with them (if I choose). Either they provide an easy-to-use service, or give me the code to put a chicklette on my site.

So how many Museums offer people the opportunity to affiliate themselves with the museum online? e.g. here’s a quick piece of code that lets you post the museums calendar on your site, or an authorized image. Museums already have “friends” groups, what if I could declare my friendship to a museum online? Would people take the bait? Would I like the friends I found online?
What could my friends network tell me that I didn’t already know? How else might museums put themselves in the middle of interesting social networks?