Here’s a nice summary of other museums running blogs.
We’re not on the list yet.
But we will be.
Category: Web 2.0
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Steve.museum update from M&W2006
Read the latest about the collective museum folksonomy project, Steve.museum from Museums & The Web 06. Our Electronic Swatchbook projects gets a mention.
Social tagging applications such as flickr and del.icio.us have become extremely popular. Their socially-focussed data collection strategies seem to have potential for museums struggling to make their collections more accessible and to build communities of interest around their holdings. But little is known about the terminology that visitors to museum sites might contribute or how best to obtain both useful terms and on-going social involvement in tagging museum collections. In the steve.museum project, a number of art museums are collaboratively researching this opportunity. These research questions and an architecture for a prototype research application are presented here. Prototypes created to date are discussed and plans for future development and term-collection prototype deployment are presented. We discuss the potential use of folksonomy within museums and the requirements for post-processing of terms that have been gathered, both to test their utility and to deploy them in useful ways.
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How to fix big media
Here’s some interesting discussion on audience co-creation, but Haque’s concept of the ‘competence trap’ is perhaps even more interesting in terms of what is going on in the socio-cultural shift that is taking place.
“That is because most companies undergoing massive disruptions in their industries fall into what Haque calls a “competence trap.” They keep trying to do what they do best and insisting that it is still valuable, even though the changing environment calls for a new set of skills. A company suffering from a competence trap is like a fish trying to swim on land by flapping its fins in the air, when what it should be doing is trying to use its fins to drag itself through the mud.”
From How To Fix Time Warner:
The competence trap Time Warner must avoid is the notion that media content is something that is made by professionals, instead of a catalyst for the creation of more content by the amateurs in the audience. Comparing the quality of this consumer-generated content to the content made by the professionals is beside the point. The value of content is increasingly coming from the fact that it allows people to express themselves and create relationships with other like-minded spirits. Rather than resist this emerging consumer behavior, Time Warner should embrace it and encourage it.
Beyond that, Time Warner should give the army of amateur video directors out there access to sophisticated Web-based video editing tools to help raise the bar (and potential audience) of all the amateur video out there. The best stuff could be repackaged as regular DVDs or streamed over the Web with ads, with the amateur directors getting a cut of the revenues. One good thing about the audience creating its own content is that the production costs all but disappear.
Any media executive reading this might be scratching his head right now and wondering how he is supposed to charge for his content if he is going to give it away for free. But that kind of thinking just leads to another competence trap. It is the old product mentality coming through. Remember, this is now a relationship business, and relationships are usually two-way things. What that means is that increasingly, the content itself will have less value than what people can do with it. “In the very near future,” predicts Haque, “the content will only be valuable if it can be bundled in new ways.”
I posted this earlier as a comment but it was a bit buried there so here it is reprised.
There’s a more ecomomics focussed (but excellent) article on ‘peer production’ at Bubblegeneration.
2.0 technologies allow production to be atomized – to be subdivided into arbitrarily fine microchunks of value activities. Prosumers can self-select and manage their own interactions with these microchunks, rather than incurring the real-world coordination costs of managers, meetings, and red tape.
Because these microchunks of prosumer-contributed information can then be recombined and reused, the community realizes a second network effect: the total value of the network of microchunks is greater than the additive value of each individual microchunks.
All this implies that peer production is an extremely powerful and hyperefficient way to organize the production of goods and service that meet certain criteria. Recently, investment in peer production models has hit an inflection point: Kleiner Perkins’ recent investment in Zazzle is a bet on peer production, as are the new breed of social search startups, such as JetEye, Squidoo, and del.icio.us, as are vertical communities, such as Last.fm, Flickr, and Basenotes.
I’d also strongly recommend downloading the Powerpoint titled The Atomizing Hand – The Strategy and Economics of Peer Production, that is linked to the article by Umair Haque from Bubblegeneration.
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What is Web 2.0?
Love it or hate it, the term “Web 2.0” is here to stay and if you haven’t come across it yet, you will very soon – again and again.
This article attempts to define “Web 2.0” and it is a great place to start if you want to know what the hype is all about.
I personally think the web is up to at least version 50.2 but one thing is evident. The web is going through a radical shift and web developers such as myself are finding websites can no longer be JUST websites. They need to be organically structured to learn, change and grow on their own.
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228
Interesting comments from Schonfeld on How MySpace Beat Friendster
But it was Tagworld CEO (and aspiring MySpace competitor) Fred Krueger who really put his finger on why MySpace succeeded and Friendtser didn’t (that’s him in the picture putting his finger on it):
“There is a tendency to over-intellectualize the problem. The reason kids left Friendster is that it did not allow strikethroughs of every word and personal pages with black backgrounds. Have you ever seen a teenager’s room? That’s what MySpace looks like. Friendster took people off because they put up pictures of their dog.”
The lesson there is that if you are trying to build a social network, you need to let the members express themselves however they like, even if you don’t like how they are doing it.
It will be interesting to look at MySpace in 2 years time. Riffing on Krueger’s point, I think that part of the reason MySpace is so attractive to teens is that is repels older people first in terms of visual design, and secondly in terms of content. I often get asked whether band x or y should set up a MySpace site and generally I tell them not to bother – especially not if they already have some other well indexed and SEO-ed web presence, and they are not trying to target the teen market. MySpace is good for storing and streaming audio – but how long will that last after GDrive, Amazon’s S3 etc really get going and limitless online storage becomes a reality? MySpace is also very good for Murdoch/Fox who now own a powerful market research tool – for a particular age group which is generally hard for traditional market research to deal with.
I’ve added the top 500 of our current shared del.icio.us bookmarks to the sidebar for ease of use.
You’ll probably need to still go and use our del.icio.us account to view them chronologically or navigate by tags.
But it saves on doubling up on lots of links.
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Google Calendar
Wow.
Screenshots and discussion of the soon to be released Google Calendar application – tightly integrated with Gmail, free, accepts RSS feeds, has connectors for desktop calendar software . . . . .
Finally a single centralised calendaring option. Work + home + play no longer means three seperate applications.
Emily Chang, once again, delivers an excellent article on designing for Web2.0.
She has interviewed over 60 of the new Web 2.0 startups about their design philosophies.
In reading the current sixty interview responses, there’s a clear trend towards several key words that continue to appear in people’s answers:
simple
fast
intuitive
social
minimal
choice
useful
funThere’s also the echo of key actions:
listen
iterate
release early
experience
discoverWhile some of these would have been considered in early generations of web, it’s significant that we’re hearing these repeated with such frequency. It’s taken a while to free web and UI design from the bonds of graphic design emulation (early 1990’s) or the web as self-contained animation (late 1990’s flash). Blogs, CSS, web standards, content management systems, and the cry of “usability!” finally put a stake in these paradigms (early 2000’s), but they also introduced something else that could have been just as blasé – the template. Luckily, user experience, long accepted in other industries, came into the web scene and gave design decisions a social and anthropological basis for understanding how subtle shifts could help or hinder a user. Both designers, developers, and decision makers could break away from a generic view of the amorphous “user” with mental mapping, personas, and frequent user testing. This gave us live results and clues into how our users think so that we could provide alternate design solutions. But, the challenge still remained. Making these changes a technical reality could mean more customization to a proprietary system, or hacking an open source solution, or purchasing additional software, or bringing in more programming resources. Development or user testing costs often prevented a truly iterative design process.