The Powerhouse Museum has been doing quite a few new online experiments this year and the simplest of these – so simple that any other museum large or small could do too – is public facing blogging. I’m not talking about this blog, Fresh+New, which itself is getting around 10,000 visitors each month but is more of a specialist museum-professional blog; but informational blogs that communicate generalist information directly to the public.
Currently we have two such blogs with another two on their way in coming weeks – Design Hub which is a combination collection portal and design blog, and Free Radicals which extends the museum’s public sustainability-related talks series into a current affairs and science blog.
The first public facing blog is Walking The Wall, a blog that tracks the travels of Brendan Fletcher and Emma Nicholas, two amateur walkers who approached the museum with an offer to document their walk of the Great Wall of China. Brendan and Emma had heard about the museum’s upcoming Great Wall of China exhibition, and wanted to contribute in some way. The museum met with them and my team suggested that might wish to document their walk by writing a blog as they walked the route of the wall. We trained them quickly on WordPress which they quickly picked up and they were off. Both Emma and Brendan had previous writing credentials, good photography skills, and we had confidence that they would do a good job – we also pointed them to a few popular travel blogs to show them the style of writing and content we were after.
The second is Observations which is written by the staff at the Sydney Observatory. Observations allows the Sydney Observatory to contribute regularly updated content to their website in a manner which can address the immediate interests and questions of the general public, as well as help promote their specialist events, and the research undertaken at the Observatory and by associated amateur astronomy groups. The Observatory staff were briefed on the ways in which blogging operated in terms of a communication method and general protocols. They also got a quick introduction to WordPress – but that was it.
So, what impact have these blogs had on interactions with the museum? And have they contributed to online visitation?
In July 2006 Walking The Wall received 6,739 visitors, and the Observations blog 3,698 visitors. It is fair to say that a large proportion of the visitors are new visitors – and the overall increase in site visitation, especially at the Sydney Observatory indicates that. Excluding spam, the Walking The Wall blog has logged 186 visitor comments (for 28 posts) and Observations 43 comments (for 25 posts).
Walking The Wall has received media attention and has is featured regularly on national radio (ABC Radio National and 702) as people around the country follow the journey. In many ways, Walking The Wall is operating as a good travel blog should – allowing readers to live vicariously through our intrepid adventurers.
Observations is allowing the Sydney Observatory to respond to current events such as the August 27 Mars hoax email – a post that has already attracted 30 comments to date – in a manner that was previously impossible to achieve quickly and easily on the main Observatory website.