Category: Web 2.0

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Museum blogging Social networking Web 2.0 Web metrics Young people & museums

More on levels of participation / Forrester’s “social technographics”

In a most timely fashion for our recent discussions of ‘levels of participation’, from Forrester’s comes the ‘Social Technographics‘ report.

This is a very interesting and relevant report to all the museum sector. It breaks down user-types into several categories and then maps the differing proportions of each category as represented across different social media websites.

I particularly like their breakdown of users into creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. Their call for companies and others to analyse how their customers might fit into these categories before creating their ‘social strategy’ is timely, post MW2007. I would expect that in comparison to larger corporate social sites, museums are most likely to have their major audiences less likely to be creators and that we should be encouraging a growth in critics – who most likely align with our existing strategies and long-time organisational strengths in encouraging and managing academic criticism.

Also, looking at their figures for the different user breakdowns between sites classifying as ‘entertainment’ (more participatory) and ‘family’ (less likely to be participatory), our sector needs to be conscious of how our sites appear to our audiences.

Those who have looked at our recent website for parents and young children – Play at Powerhouse – will notice we haven’t included any ‘social’ elements. We did an analysis of who the likely users of the site were going to be, considered their time constraints, and focussed on producing a site full of offline interactive activities (we’ve just added 4 new craft activities), and visit-related content. As the audience for the site grows, we will be adding social elements.

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Museum blogging Web 2.0

Powerhouse Museum’s official blog policy – April 2007

Many museums have been asking about blog policies.

Our Executive has recently signed off on a museum-wide blog policy and so I’m happy to be able to share ours with you.

The policy document is presented as a series of points to make it a little more readable, and overall the intention has been to make the process of proposing and getting approval for a museum blog as quick and easy as possible.

Download as a PDF.

We are much indebted to the Walker Art Center whose publicly shared blogging guidelines formed the initial framework for our policy.

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MW2007 Social networking Web 2.0 Web metrics Young people & museums

Levels of participation / community

I’m still waiting for the actual Hitwise figures to be released but Red Herring reports on Bill Tancer’s presentation at the Web2.0 conference/expo.

A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.

Similarly, only two-tenths of 1 percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.

The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes―voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Mr. Tancer’s statistics show.

We already knew this.

What is interesting is that the popularity of these sites and similar is not reliant on content upload-style participation. Indeed, the report continues,

Visits by web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 percent of U.S. web activity, up from only 2 percent two years ago, the study showed.

Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 percent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 percent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows.

An older, first generation of sites, now in the minority, are photo-finishing sites that give users the ability to store, share, and print photos.

This reaffirms the importance of having different levels of content participation – and the primacy of content, the truism that has been around since the birth of the web. Most of your userbase will be lurkers, viewers – they won’t contribute – but if you can leverage and re-present the proportionally small amount of user-generated content you do get, then you are likely to be able to ride a wave of interest in your site.

At Museums & the Web this year everyone was floored by the efforts of the Brooklyn Museum who have managed to build a strong user community around their online presence (they even have a top level navigation called ‘Community’). Whilst a superficial look at the Brooklyn Museum might suggest that this is because of their use of technology – Flickr groups in particular, I’d suggest their success is a result of their existing strong ties with the local community, of which the Flickr groups and image upload participation is a logical extension of their mission. What Flickr offers the museum is many-fold. Firstly there is new traffic – leveraging the existing Flickr audience (much in the same way Ideum’s work with the Maxwell has); secondly Flickr’s API makes for easy presentation and integration on the Brooklyn’s own website.

Does that mean when I visit I will be uploading my photos? Probably not. Whilst I have a Flickr account (first barrier to participation overcome) and have a comfort level with Flickr (second barrier to participation overcome), I am not a part of the Brooklyn Museum community, I am just a casual visitor. As a result the incentive for me to participate is low. I am more than happy to lend my eyeballs to their site and browse at their pre-existing Flickr galleries though which results in the Brooklyn getting more of my attention and traffic (along with Flickr). Brooklyn is leveraging Flickr for Flickr’s community.

So, again I come back to the point that museums need to find ways of effectively optimising the network effects of what little traffic we get. One user contribution should spark the interest of one thousand lurkers, rather than requiring one thousand contributions from other users. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it is more difficult than you think. How can you make one Flickr image on your site be more powerful than an online forum on your site with just one singular post in it?

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MW2007 Web 2.0

“We just don’t have time” – the culture of busy-ness

One of the re-occuring themes in questions I’ve been fielding throughout M&W2007 is that of problems of the organisational culture of ‘busy-ness’.

This came up both in our workshop on Planning for social media as well as in other sessions on museum blogging and discussions of moving web projects out of just the web team. The “we just don’t have time” seems to be the clarion call of those who we most need to get involved in social media in our museums.

So, how to navigate this?

Andrew McAfee at Harvard Business School has written a lot about Enterprise 2.0 which is effectively about implementing social media into the internal workings of your organisation. Technology companies have been forging ahead in this area for a long time – IBM’s internal wikis, Microsoft’s internal staff blogs etc – there are plenty of examples. Often internal implementation of social media tools ends up in the organisation deploying similar social media tools externally, as the internal use makes everyone in the organisation aware of the benefits, as well as gives them a chance to come up with policies, procedures and solutions to some of the pitfalls and unexpected risks of such tools. Indeed, many of the museums I’ve been speaking to as well the Powerhouse Museum itself started with internal social media experiments first.

McAfee’s recent post on the subject is interesting as has application in the museum sector. McAfee, speaking to his MBA students finds that:

students bring up one specific concern: that people who use the new tools heavily — who post frequently to an internal blog, edit the corporate wiki a lot, or trade heavily in the internal prediction market — will be perceived as not spending enough time on their ‘real’ jobs.

and that,

Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don’t want to be seen as not busy enough.

And even if the leaders in such companies sincerely want to exploit the new tools and harness the collective intelligence of their people, they might have a tough time convincing the workforce that busyness is no longer the ne plus ultra. Corporate cultures move slowly and with difficulty, and it will take a lot more than a few memos, speeches, and company retreats to convince people that it’s a smart career idea, rather than a poor one, to contribute regularly and earnestly to E2.0 platforms.

I often look to high-tech companies to observe state-of-the-art work practices. Something about the intensity of both the competition and the war for talent in their industries makes them laboratories for workplace innovations. And even though technology producers face time pressures that are as intense as anyone’s, many of them have not developed cultures of busyness. In fact, some have tried hard to build in the opposite mentality in their employees. Google, for example, gives their engineers ‘20% time’ – the equivalent of a day a week ‘to pursue projects they’re passionate about.’

This is especially relevant in institutions where the ‘research’ is seen as the ‘real knowledge work’ – science museums undertaking scientific research etc. In these organisations it is understandable that staff who are focussed on peer recognition through academic publications and research might be hesitant to embrace social media tools simply because they aren’t valued outside the organisation where most of their academic peers exist.

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Museum blogging MW2007 Web 2.0 Web metrics

M&W07 – Day three: Radical Trust – State of the Museum Blogosphere

Jim Spadaccini and I have just finished presenting our mini-workshop surveying the museum blogosphere.

The detailed results are online at Archimuse, and the slides including updated data are available here.

(update – Nate at Walker Art has posted some discussion of the q&a at the end of the presentation)

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MW2007 Web 2.0 Web metrics

M&W07 – Day two:Peacock & Brownbill on audiences, visitors, and users

Because of timetable clashes I missed Darren Peacock and Johnny Brownbill’s presentation on the evaluation work that has gone into the forthcoming redevelopment of the Museum Victoria website.

Their hybrid model of ‘integrated analysis’ of a museum website is a solid approach that addresses many of the holes in other more traditional models. Of course it has to be seen whether this new means of analysis can produce a better website down the track.


(from Peacock & Brownbill)

Categories
Collection databases Folksonomies Metadata Web 2.0

M&W07 – Day two: Rjiksmuseum & CHIP

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and several Dutch universities have been working on an exciting collection project which uses ratings and user profiles to recommend art to users. Whilst I was a little sceptical of their ‘ratings’ (1 to 5 stars) as a means of describing art, the recommendation tools and prototype interface were fascinating. Also exciting was the means by which they exposed the ‘recommendations’ – ‘You are recommended these because . . . ” is very reminiscent of Amazon’s additions of the last few years.

Most of all, though, the most striking thing about the CHIP was the ability for the user to generate a printable/downloadable map customised to show them their favourite and recommended artworks. This high level of integration between the onsite recommendations and the gallery floor is something we are thinking a lot about at the Powerhouse Museum in our OPAC project – especially for use at our Castle Hill open storage facility.

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Collection databases Folksonomies MW2007 Web 2.0

M&W07 – Day two: Tagging & Tracking / OPAC2.2

Thanks to all who came to my paper presentation.

The paper is online over at Archimuse or if you are attending it is also in the printed proceedings (which is a little easier to read on public transport). You can also download my slides but bear in mind they need to be viewed in conjunction with the paper itself.

Apologies to the questioner who asked why we don’t allow logins to let people keep track of the tags they have added. It was a good question which I rather abruptly passed over. The problem with logins is that they raise another barrier to participation – at least at this early stage. Whilst I understand that some power users would then get the ability to create a ‘MyTags personalisation’, the risk of deterring other users is high – I’d liken the power user to casual user ratio as probably being 1 in 100, if not more. At the moment I think we have the balance right with tagging and we are still analysing the usage – remembering that they are more for navigation and discovery than for descriptive purposes (unlike, say, an art museum). We might add that at a later stage however.

Thanks to Ian Johnson for the great suggestion about adding a ‘do you really want to delete that tag’ dialog to the tag deletion to prevent accidental deletion. We will implement that pretty much straight away I think.

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Interactive Media MW2007 Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

M&W07 – Day two: SecondLife

Richard Urban delivered an entertaining but technology-bug plagued presentation on museums in SecondLife. Richard’s paper was full of good examples of real and user-created museums that have sprung up in SL and again asked the question of whether museums should be dipping their toes in the SL waters. If you are curious then Richard’s presentation is a good introduction and a solid overview of what is possible and how you might do it.

When combined with the Exploratorium’s SL pioneers Rothfarb and Doherty and their workshop there is a good body of museum-centric introductory information out there, along with Nina Simon and Jim Spadaccini’s previous work on SL.

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Interactive Media Museum blogging MW2007 Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

M&W07 – Day two: Web2.0, EyeLevel, Brooklyn Museum, Science Museum UK

The Web2.0 stream began with Jeff Gates from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s EyeLevel blog. Discussing EyeLevel, Gates explained their cautious but highly successful approach to getting blogging activated within a large and venerable organisation like the Smithsonian.

Before gong public EyeLevel was used internally for two months with sample posts and comments within SAAM to ensure that they had got the workflow for the blog sorted out. Their workflow, which continues today is that posts are suggested, discussed by the web team, drafted, then rewritten where necessary. All posts are then edited by the publications unit, and require individual approval by the Director before going live. They use Basecamp for the drafting and discussion (which is a nice way doing things).

Whilst this approval model brings delays and limits their ability to do quick response posts it brings great clarity to the roles of each blog team member which has helped keep the blog sustainable. Also, by defining and articulating their blog policy internally prior to launch EyeLevel has been able to maintain “authenticity and transparency” with their readership without being dragged into being overly promotional. That said, part of he rationale for establishing EyeLevel was to help expose their long tail of collection and online content, and to build a strong connection between web visits and bricks and mortar visitation.

The Brooklyn Museum team presented their very inspirational work in engaging their communities through the use of Flickr and MySpace. They were at pains to point out that before the web the Brooklyn Museum was already very heavily oriented as a museum belonging to and integrated with the local community. It was also already highly interactive. They showed their public graffiti wall within an exhibition on street art and graffiti, and it was from this exhibition that they started using Flickr as a way of documenting the use of the wall. By using Flickr they were able to connect to other images of graffiti around Brooklyn and connect with the Flickr community. Likewise they have used Flickr to pull in public images of the Brooklyn Bridge.

From this point they moved to establish a main navigational node on their website titled ‘community’. This uses Flickr and YouTube APIs to pull in user generated content from those other external sources to the Brooklyn Museum site based on user tags. They also established a comments gallery which is user-moderated, and most excitingly, replaced all their paper comment forms with kiosks in the galleries for visitors to type their comments directly in. By doing this they have removed the distinction between the comments of in-gallery visitors and web visitors – ALL are visitors.

The final presentation was from Mike Ellis at the Science Museum in London. Mike talked about ways of navigating the institutional barriers to implementing Web2.0. He pretty much addressed each of the major concerns of those outside of web teams – do the users want it?, issues of voice and authority, technical impediments with small teams, resourcing and cost, and legals.