Have you ever been in a museum and wished that there were someone readily available to ask a question that popped into your head? Outside of school field trips you aren’t likely to find a Museum Curator roaming around the gallery with visitors.

Enter Twitter, where tomorrow you will be able to ask those burning art or museum related questions that you’ve always been interested in. September 1st is ‘Ask a Curator‘ day on Twitter. All you’ll need to do is pose your question in 140 characters or less using the hashtag #askacurator. How easy is that?

When you visit the Ask a Curator site you’ll be able to view a listing of the participating museums from across the globe. This allows you access from the comfort of your favorite Twitter client.

Personally, I think this is a great way to show someone the value & power of social media. The idea of this ‘event’ opens up world of museums to anyone who wants to participate. I applaud the efforts to make the museum experience more relevant. I don’t think the days of ‘Shhhh’ or ‘Quiet Please’ are soon to be gone from your favorite museum. I do think it is great to see them joining the world of social.

Updated:

I asked this question yesterday:

This morning I received a response from Birmingham Museums (@BM_AG) in the UK:

This one came from Avoncroft Museum (@AvoncroftMuseum) in Worcestershire, UK. They are a museum of historic buildings & I love their response!

To the complete and utter shock of the rest of the world, the U.S. has somehow blossomed into a nation that likes to drink good beer. Remember how surprised they all were when we started making decent wine (the subject of the recent movie Bottle Shock)?

Well, after decades of dedicated brewing, craft beer in the U.S. is finally exploding in the market place. In the first half of 2010, sales volume at craft brewers rose 9%, while overall sales volume for the U.S. beer industry dropped 2.7%.

Those are impressive numbers, but craft brews only made up a paltry 7% of the beer market in 2009. It’s easier to see impressive increases when you’re still a small part of the market. On the other hand, that little 7% is almost double the 2008 share of the market when craft brews were only 4%. That’s right, during one of the biggest recessions in our history, expensive beers almost doubled their market share.

As the category grows, so does the number of U.S. brewers. In the last year alone, 100 new craft brewers have entered the market according the Brewers Association. It seems like a huge number, but most of them only brew and sell locally – a boon to the rising tide of localvores. Of all the craft brewers in the U.S., Sam Adams is the largest, with a market share of around 1% of the U.S. beer market.

What we are seeing is [the] emergence of a real beer culture in the United States,” C. James Koch, founder of Boston Beer, told BusinessWeek. “Twentysomethings are adopting craft beer in the same way that baby boomers adopted wine.”

Admittedly, 1% is tiny, especially compared to Anheuser-Busch’s solid 50.9%. But that hasn’t stopped big brewers from taking notice and offering their own versions of craft beers. Anheuser-Busch has released several craft brews ostensibly under the Michelob label, but with the branding nearly absent. Shock Top and Hop Hound are both marketed without the Michelob name attached, unlike Michelob’s other craft offerings like Michelob Bavarian Wheat and Michelob Porter.

Champions of craft beer consider this brand deception and shy away from offerings by the bigger brewers. In fact, this past Monday, shares of the Craft Brewers Alliance fell sharply on speculation that Anheuser-Busch may try to buy out the alliance.

It makes sense that the fans of craft brews would fear consolidation. The craft brew scene in America is all about variety: imitating the vast variety of European styles and putting stuff in beer that would give any reasonable German a heart attack. If there’s anywhere in the world our beer scene resembles, it’s Belgium, whose 125 breweries produce 800 standard beers. If you add special and seasonal beers, there are actually around 8,700 beers made in Belgium. Of course, for all its size in the beer world, Belgium is physically quite small. There are over 1,675 registered craft brewers in the US, and no one has a reliable estimate of exactly how many varieties there are.

More Brewers Mean More Beer

In fact, if there’s anything that gives America the edge in the world beer scene, it’s our extreme beers. Koch first used the term to describe the release of Sam Adams Triple Bock in 1994 (then the strongest beer at 17.5% ABV), but we’ve been brewing insanity ever since: tripling the hops, tossing in oysters, seaweed, heather, strawberries, raisins, basically anything that will ferment, and seeing what brews.

Dogfish Head Spits in Their Beer

Dogfish Head, a brewery known for their quirky beers and non-traditional brewing methods, leads the American craft brewers in quirky experimentation. They’re offering Chicha again this year: a beer made in the traditional Peruvian fashion. That is: it’s fermented with spit. That’s right, the whole brewery gets together and chews purple corn for a day before leaving it to ferment and eventually make its way into the beer. Dogfish Head assures consumers that the spit-fermented beer is totally sanitary, as it’s boiled after the whole spit ordeal, but no amount of boiling can wash away the off-putting connotation of drinking someone else’s spit.

Dogfish Head also offers Midas Touch, a beer created from ingredients in the sediment found on vessels in the tomb of King Midas, Chateau Jiahu, inspired by trace ingredients from a 9,000-year-old dig in China, and Palo Santo Marron, a beer aged in unique handmade wooden brewing vessels of Palo Santo wood.

And, shock of shocks, America’s extreme brewing has even caught on in other countries. Since the creation Sam Adams Triple Bock, it’s been a constant contest to become the world’s strongest beer. On July 22^nd, BrewDog, a Scottish brewing company, announced its 55% ABV brew as the strongest in the world. They were offering 11 bottles of the stuff called “The End of History,” which they claimed was the final word in the ABV wars. Each bottle came inside a dead squirrel or stoat. They sold out in an hour. Then, just seven days later on July 29^th, the Dutch brewer ‘t Koelschip (The Refrigerated Ship) announced its 60% ABV beer called “Start the Future.”

Scottish Brewer BrewDog Stuck Its Latest Beer in Dead Things.

The future of craft beers looks bright indeed. A recent Gallup poll found that 67% of Americans say they drink alcohol, the highest percentage in 25 years.

And what’s their number one choice of beverage? Beer.

What if an injury or disease prevented you from doing the things you love? Sadly, for legendary LA graffiti and street artist Tony Quan this unfortunate circumstance had become a reality. In 2003, Quan was suddenly diagnosed with a severe case of ALS, which left him physically paralyzed except for his eyes.

An initiative involving members of Free Art & Technology, OpenFrameworks, the Graffiti Research Lab has brought new hope to artists who have been struck with disease or injury. The team is working on developing a low-cost eye-tracking device and software to allow graffiti creators and other artists to continue pursuing their passion while only using their eyes.

Similar technologies have been developed in the past, but with a 5-figure price tag, they are often too difficult to afford. The project, known as the EyeWriter Initiative, has worked to construct a product made of simple parts with a cost of roughly $50. The EyeWriter works by tracking movements of the pupil, translating these movements to points, and calibrating these coordinates on a computer screen. Drawn images can then be colored and shaded by following eye movements as well.

For Tony, being able to graffiti again was a dream come true which he described as feeling “like you are taking your first breath after being under water for 5 minutes”. In the initial demonstration, the EyeWriter team set up the device for Tony to use. As Tony painted on the screen, the graffiti tags were projected onto LA buildings outside his room. The crew ran a live video feed back to his room so he could witness his art going up on buildings in real time.

The EyeWriter Initiative is the result of creative collaboration from several intelligent people with great hearts. The team is continuing to work on enhancing the device and coding the program in order to benefit all artists suffering from ALS.  The EyeWriter programs are open source and free to download from their website, which also includes instructions to make the glasses necessary yourself. Watch a video of Tony and the EyeWriter in action below:

Playing in a tree house has long been a staple of American childhood, much like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Flinstones chewable vitamins. There is nothing like escaping the stresses of elementary school by hiding away in your treetop mansion while eating animal crackers and contemplating all of life’s complexities. Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, we forget the joys of being perched atop an oak tree and stick to activities involving the much lower and safer surface we commonly refer to as the ground.

A recent architectural endeavor, however, has now made it acceptable to enjoy the pleasures of a tree house without having to be under the age of 12 or a member of the Swiss Family Robinsons. Sweden’s new Treehotel is quickly gaining press for its intriguing conceptualization and design.  Located in Harads, a town 37 miles below the Arctic circle, this structural masterpiece consists of four separate rooms, each secured to one or more trees between 4 to 6 yards off the ground.

Each room was designed with a theme in mind (including the birdhouse above, a UFO, and more) and allows guests to fully experience the beauty of their surroundings.  The rooms were constructed of wood and glass and come standard with a heated floor as well as an eco-friendly toilet and sink. With the hotel being open year round, it will be sure to provide an experience for everyone to enjoy, whether that be a view of the northern lights during the winter, or being able to bathe in the midnight sun beneath the summer sky. Plans are in the works to complete 24 total rooms, each from a different architect, in the next five years. The grand opening for the hotel has been set for July 17th.  At a price equivalent to about $560 per night for a room, staying in the Treehotel will cost a pretty penny.

With environmentally friendly trends and “going green” being on the rise as of late, eco-tourism is sustaining significant growth. The Treehotel plays into this progression while making a powerful artistic statement. I love this idea for a hotel and the fact that the owners are incorporating so many different architects in the process. Each room is representative of a diverse artistic style, and would be a sight to see even if you were not planning on staying. Even with global warming (or “not” global warming if that’s your cup of tea), Harads is still a bit cold so if you decide to venture to the Treehotel make sure you bring a jacket, or six.

Italian street artist, BLU, has been at it again, this time with his take on evolution and the end of the world. The video is a bit long, so make sure you have time to watch it all. His painting & animation is, simply put, amazing.

Graffiti creation meets Foursquare style location fun in the iPhone game TagDis. The application combines augmented reality and geo-location so you can tag your world with virtual graffiti. It includes different fonts, stencils and digital spray paint to help in your street art creations.

The video below shows how the application works with your iPhone’s camera:

What location game would be complete without some healthy competition? Drop your tag and get votes to become king of the block. Check the leaderboard to see how you’re doing against the competition.

With location-based tools, such as Foursquare, becoming more mainstream, applications that allow for a little creativity may eventually give early adopters a less crowded spot to play.

Sometimes all it takes is a blank canvas, and not necessarily a traditional one. Blank buildings or walls are proving the perfect backdrop for digital graffiti art.

This weekend, that’s exactly what will take over the Gulf coast town of Alys Beach, Florida. A Digital Arts Festival that’s being called the world’s first projection art festival will take place on Saturday night.

Participating artists will take advantage of the town’s blank, white buildings and use them as a canvas for digital art. Thirty-six artists are expected to take part in what will be an evening full of interactive art and music.

Event organizer Mike Ragsdale told CNN.com about the genesis of the idea:

“My company once wrote video game reviews for Time Warner, and we often tested the games by projecting them onto a huge white wall in our office,” said Ragsdale.

“Because the buildings in Alys Beach are white, it occurred to me that our town is like one giant blank canvas. So the notion of fusing together art, architecture and technology eventually evolved into the Digital Graffiti event.”

I guess you really never know where an idea might come from. This could be one to hit the road for.

Gizmodo shared some useful advice today on how to create a Coke bottle cheat sheet using common household items: Coke bottle (what else), glue stick, scissors, and a computer with a printer and scanner.

We don’t of course advocate cheating but do appreciate interesting mashups. Instead of spending so much time coming up with a cheat sheet for your Coke bottle, perhaps this could be an interesting way to pass silly love notes among friends. Definitely a way to spread some happiness.

[Disclosure: Coca-Cola is a BFG client.]

The next installment of the Creative Seed will take place at 7pm on Monday, May 3rd, at SCAD’s Arnold Hall. This time out we will hear from Drew Dougherty, Branding Design Director at BXC, an active-lifestyle design firm based in southern California.

Drew has over 20 years of experience as a designer and art director, having developed logos, rebranding systems and ad campaigns for a variety of action-sports and lifestyle companies, including Kelly Slater’s Komunity, Nixon Watches, CamelBak, Giro, O’Neill and more.

Drew will also make a presentation Backstage in our Hilton Head office on Friday, April 30th. This intimate chat will provide an opportunity for exclusive Q & A between Drew and the BFG crew; a chance to compare notes and draw mutual inspiration.

The Creative Seed Initiative is a distinctive speaker series that brings together Savannah’s vibrant creative community with some of the most highly regarded and inspiring artists working in the creative industries today. Past speakers have included Dan Ibarra and Mike Byzewski from Aesthetic Apparatus, graphic designer Charles Wilkin from Automatic IAM, and Pentagram Design partner DJ Stout.

The Creative Seed Initiative is a joint venture between BFG Communications and the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Okay, maybe not the world, but how about saving 8,500 tons of paper, 1 million liters of water, 10 tons of carbon emissions, and 20 million megajoules of electricity? That’s what Puma is doing with their Clever Little Bag.

Cool sneakers, cleaner planet. Sounds like a win-win to me.