Category: Web 2.0

Categories
Collection databases Web 2.0

Google co-op search experiments

Jim at Ideum encouraged me to have a play with Google’s Co-op Search.

In about 5 minutes I set up the start of a global museum collection search.

Give it a go – either by using the box below or visiting its own page museum collection search.







Then contribute your own museum collection URLs to it by following the instructions on the search page.

Obviously this only works for collections that have been well spidered by Google already. It won’t pick up those that aren’t – I tried adding the Victoria & Albert Museum’s image search without much success, for example. Others that are well spidered like ours and the Met Museum work very well.

Google Co-op is really a way of refining the results of standard Google by focussing its results on an aggregated selection of URLs – think of it as a way of performing multiple advanced searches at the same time.

Categories
Web 2.0

100 other search engines

SEO consultant Charles Knight reminds us that there are many other search engines that Google, Yahoo, MSN search.

Knight classifies these alternative search options into several categories – recommendation engines (social searching), metasearch (multiple searches through one interface), AI and human search (ask a question, get a ‘real’ answer), clustering searches (which give you new ways of navigating results), and of course those that search a niche subset of web content.

The list is worth a peruse – whilst Google may, at least in Australia, massively dominate the general web search space (Google and its geographic variants represents well over 90% of search traffic to Powerhouse Museum) – this almost certainly will not always be the case in the future.

Categories
Interactive Media Web 2.0 Web metrics

Jenkins & Shirky discuss Second Life, virtual worlds, social media

Some quite fantastic dialogue between Clay Shirky at Corante and Henry Jenkins.

The discussion goes well beyond Second Life and moves across the sphere of virtual worlds, games and the social communications that are emerging from these environments.

Jenkins –

I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games — it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What’s striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

Shirky –

Games have at least three advantages other virtual worlds don’t. First, many games, and most social games, involve an entrance into what theorists call the magic circle, an environment whose characteristics include simplified and knowable rules. The magic circle saves the game from having to live up to expectations carried over from the real world.

Second, games are intentionally difficult. If all you knew about golf was that you had to get this ball in that hole, your first thought would be to hop in your cart and drive it over there. But no, you have to knock the ball in, with special sticks. This is just about the stupidest possible way to complete the task, and also the only thing that makes golf interesting. Games create an environment conducive to the acceptance of artificial difficulties.

Finally, and most relevant to visual environments, our ability to ignore information from the visual field when in pursuit of an immediate goal is nothing short of astonishing (viz. the gorilla experiment.) The fact that we could clearly understand spatial layout even in early and poorly rendered 3D environments like Quake has much to do with our willingness to switch from an observational Architectural Digest mode of seeing (Why has this hallway been accessorized with lava?) to a task-oriented Guns and Ammo mode (Ogre! Quad rocket for you!)

In this telling, games are not just special, they are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism. There is still a premium on good design and playability, but the magic circle, acceptance of arbitrary difficulties, and goal-directed visual filtering give designers ways to contextualize or bury at least some platform limitations. These are not options available to designers of non-game environments; asking users to accept such worlds as even passable simulacra subjects those environments to withering scrutiny.

Categories
Collection databases Interactive Media Web 2.0

Kathy Sierra on serendipity

I’ve just spent the last while finishing off my papers for Museums & The Web 2007. One of them on the OPAC2.0 collection database talks alot about the idea of ‘serendiptity’ and its importance in creating new ways for users to not only navigate but to find and create meaning in a database.

Kathy Sierra has a nice post introducing the very idea and calls for more randomness to be added to products, software and experiences.

Categories
Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

CBBC World – a children’s ‘second life’?

This project by the Childrens’ arm of the BBC sound interesting especially in light of all the talk around Second Life and museums.

CBBC, the channel for 7-12 year olds, said it would allow digitally literate children the access to characters and resources they had come to expect.

Users would be able to build an online presence, known as an avatar, then create and share content.

Bosses said CBBC World would not have the financial aspects of other online worlds such as Second Life.

A spokesman said: “This kind of cross-platform broadcasting is becoming the norm for people who have been born into the digital world.

“It will give children a chance to move around a safe, secure world where they can not only interact with familiar characters but have an opportunity to make that world a more fascinating place with their own imaginations.”

Perhaps the BBC has the audience reach to make this sort of project work, as for smaller organisations colonisation of other existing services may well prove more fruitful. Or, would museums be better off colonising worlds such as CBBC’s proposed world where the synergy between public broadcaster and public museum may ensure a better take up of virtual content?

Categories
Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Dragon & the Pearl on YouTube

We’ve put some ‘ultrasound footage’ of our resident baby dragon, from before it hatched from its mysterious egg, up on YouTube and linked from the dragon blog.

In putting it on YouTube we’ve tagged it in a way that we hope will attract those interested in UFO footage and the like, exposing our museum programme to other audiences. We’ve already started getting a few people who have seen the dragon posting about it on their own blogs, but hopefully with YouTube we can get it out to many more people.

It has been a very successful public programme and lots of fun. The dragon is ‘resting in the mountains’ at the moment but will return one last time in March.

Feel free to comment and rate it on YouTube. I’m hoping that such activities might have a similar result to that achieved by Ideum’s experiments with the Flickr ‘interestingness’ measure.

Categories
Web 2.0 Web metrics Young people & museums

Latest Pew report – teens and social networking usage

It has taken a few days for the figures from the latest Pew internet report to spread across the blogosphere. This report, Social Networking Websites & Teens, begins to problematise some of the ‘trends’ that have been generally ‘accepted’, and reveals some of the uneven use of these services by different genders and age groups.

Here is the abstract –

A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users. In the past five years, such sites have rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users. More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The survey also finds that older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.

danah boyd presents some excellent discussion of the report and points out that some of the figures might be the result of Pew’s methodology. That said, she focusses in on some of the ways that Pew reports that different teens actually ‘use’ services like MySpace. Fred Stutzman also covers the report.

Unsurprisingly The Register takes a sobering view of the report and uses it as another example of the ‘about to pop’ bubble-like nature of everything 2.0 at the moment.

Categories
Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

The future of social networking? What of Second Life?

The arrival of a new year always brings all sorts of fascinating predictions.

Two commentators on social networking sites who I always have a lot of time for are boyd and Stutzman. Between them they have revealed much about how young people use online social networking services and how young people interact with each other. Their predictions for the future trends in these services are revealing reading.

Stuztman makes a broad range of predictions, most notably that within the US there will be a shakeout of services and that the most established (MySpace, Bebo and Facebook) will be difficult to displace. He reminds us that whilst users might visit lots of different sites, they can only actively keep their own personas on one or two at a time. Protocols such as OpenID will become more necessary to support interoperability across different services – otherwise users will leave. Two other key points he makes are that informational/transactional sites with established communities of users/visitors will attempt to social-ise their user experience and that this will increase the importance of shared experience to the emergence of community.

boyd also introduces new ideas. A few days ago she reminded us that teens do not use these social networking services in the same way that older people do (that is – us). For some, forgetting a password is an experience that is fixed by simply creating a new identity on the site, or moving off to another site. Harking back to the youth studies field, she reminds us that for teenagers and youth, these sites offer a means for identity experimentation, in a way that adults do not often have the time to do with such zeal.

In her thoughts for 2007 boyd sees a fading of enthusiasm amongst teens for the major social networking services. She cites anecdotal evidence that on one hand, new teen users are growing wary of the negative coverage of stranger danger on these sites, and on the other, those who currently use these services are being turned off by the influx of PR and marketing which is getting in the way of the main reason they use these services – to communicate to their friends in their own space. The mass scale intrusion of marketing and more recently spam into some of these services is a growing problem and threatens to make some environments as unfriendly as the ‘mall’ where if you aren’t a potential shopper then you are not welcome.

So, what of Second Life?

Second Life is, as Nina Simon writes is really a social site with the look of a MMORPG. It certainly isn’t a game, as many commentators point out, Linden Labs has set it up with only the most basic of rules. People go to Second Life to, in the words of Simon, “buy items online, view/listen to concerts online, meet up with people you already know (through work, family, friends) all over the world”.

If this user intentionality is correct then I’m very interested in applying Stutzman and boyd’s predictions to Second Life. How will it survive – especially if the churn rates are as high as Shirky believes?

Some questions.

– What of persona interoperability? Using Second Life as a platform does require significant investment from the user which will inevitability take them away from maintenance of their personas on other services. Gary Hayes is positive about this, but also suggest that as open source WordPress equivalents for setting up ‘multi-user virtual environments’ become available, Second Life will have a lot of challengers. His post on MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach is an interesting look at what is likely to fragment that user base of all environments pretty quickly.

– This, then, leads into the next issue – what of the increased presence of real world companies? Will certain user groups be turned off by the presence of the real world in their Second Life alter-reality?

– What of intentionality? A lot of work has gone in from educators using Second Life as a platform for engaging particular niche audiences with learning – using Second Life as a classroom etc. But how many of these Second Life students continue to be users/citizens after class? Does it matter?

Categories
AV Related Interactive Media Web 2.0

Time based video annotation online

Mojiti and BubblePly offer time based video annotation for content posted on the main online video sharing sites. With these you can add your own subtitles or speech bubbles or other commentary to videos while they play for sharing and commenting by other viewers (who have to view the annotated video’ through either BubblePly or Mojiti).

The source file on YouTube etc stays untouched and what these two services are doing is hosting the annotations and then overlaying them as the source video plays embedded in their site.

This is a nifty idea and something that Mike Jones first suggested would be cool – in relation to some art and academic projects – about a year ago around our lunch table. Well, now it is here.

I’d assume that for most this will be a gimmick (see the sample movies on BubblePly) or useful for niche audiences (see the subtitling samples on Mojiti) but there are some really interesting possibilities for artists and others to play around with this technology too.

I remember a presentation by some academic researchers at University of Queensland who were experimenting with SMIL to build automated narrative generators and video search tools. I am not 100% sure of the project but it could have been related to the work of the Harmony Project.

Categories
Collection databases Web 2.0 Web metrics

Lorcan Dempsey on ‘intentional data’

Lorcan Dempsey opens the new year with a great post with lots of outward linkages on the under-utilisation of intentional data by libraries.

In general, consumer sites on the web make major use of such data, and it is especially valuable when they can connect it to individial identities. They use it to build up user profiles, to do rating and comparisons across sites, to recommend, and so on. Of course this is increasingly important in an environment of abundant choice and scarce attention: they are investing more effort in ‘consumption management’. We are all familiar with the benefits, and the irritations, of organizations who want to build a deeper understanding of what we do and make us offers based on that.

Libraries have a lot of data about users and usage. And there are now some initiatives which are looking at sharing it. However, in general, libraries do not have a data-driven understanding of individual users’ behaviors, or of systemwide performance of particular information resources. This is likely to change in coming years given the value of such data. So, we are seeing the growth in interest in sharing database usage data. And technical agreements and business incentives for third party providers will support this development. And, of course, libraries want to preserve the privacy of learning and research choices.

Whilst libraries are in a fundamentally better position to know more about the intentions of their users, museums tend to restrict their interest to the very visitation/donation-oriented CRM model of intention tracking.

As Dempsey points out, such data actually has much broader implications for organisations, and he summarises Chunku Mui’s proposed taxonomy of ‘Emergent Knowledge’ – knowledge that is gained about users by analysing behaviour gathered from log data and user pattern analysis.

At the Powerhouse Museum we have only very recently, with our OPAC2.0 project, started to move beyond simple log file analysis for intentional data from our website users, and now into beginning to examine the emergent trends in collection popularity. I hope that by the time Museums & The Web 2007 comes around in April, we will have the first of our open APIs to connect and use data patterns from our Synonymiser Beta.

This will allow any museum with a similar collection (or subset) to mine our anonymous behaviour data to generate recommendation data for their own collections.