The newest blog in my feed is A Latina In Museums, where Karen Vidangos shares her thoughts on “museums and the contemporary issues they face.”  In recent posts Karen shared her observations on the 2017 AAM conference, on using social media to reach diverse audiences, and musings about the entry fee (i.e., student debt) required to enter the VIP club of museum work.  (You can also follow Karen on Twitter at @latinainmuseums).

I also recommend you take a look at the Studio blog, documenting the work of Jeffrey Inscho and his team of “cultural technologists” at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. This week Jeff launched a series of posts that will document the Studio team’s development of a new kind of mobile experience: a museum chatbot called Muse.  “Muse will leverage the Studio’s user-centered design process and make use of leading-edge technologies like natural language processing and image recognition, to create an artificially-intelligent chatbot capable of providing useful information when a visitor is on-site, as well as surprising and engaging correspondence from afar.” And the Studio crew will be sharing the resulting open source code on Github, so you can build on their work!

On the podcasting front, I am SO HAPPY that after a nearly three year hiatus, Jeff Inscho and Suse Cairns have relaunched Museopunks with the support of the Alliance. The first new episode is a stunner: in The State of Love and Trust, Suse and Jeff interview Dr. fari nzinga of Southern University at New Orleans, and Adriel Luis, curator of digital and emerging media at the Smithsonian Pacific American Center. (On Twitter: @jinscho, @shineslike, @fari_nzinga, @DRZZL.)

Your turn to share! What’s on your blog roll and podcast list? Share your recommendations in the comment section, below, or tweet links tagging @futureofmuseums.