Report on the Mummies’ Trip to the Hospital

Talking Pyramids (Vincent Brown)

With photos.

Brooklyn Museum’s trip to the hospital with four of their mummies yesterday was an event not to be missed. Many of us all over the world were able to ‘tune in’ via popular social networks such as Flickr and Twitter.

Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum’s technology geek, delivered a running commentary with photos as the four mummies were taken from the museum to the North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset.
Tina determines the best route
The innovative use of the micro-blogging platform Twitter not only allowed many to follow the event step by step, but also allowed others to jump in and add their own two cents worth.

As Tina puzzled over a fold-out street map to determine what the best route was that should be taken, one observer Ian suggested Shelly help Tina by using the GoogleMaps application on her iPhone instead. Apparently Tina wanted a real map so Shelley checked the current state of the traffic on the iPhone instead.

Here’s one of her tweets:

brooklynmuseum: Figuring out good route to bring mummies into hospital #mummyCT

In no time at all word had spread all over the world as more people came on to Twitter to follow the event. Others were able to do so because all of messages, or ‘tweets’ as they are known as, had the keyword “#mummyCT” added to them. Others wanting to engage also used that keyword, or ‘hashtag’.

See the above page for the full report from Vincent.