Early this morning one lucky internet user became the person who viewed the 10 millionth object on our online collection database.
More than 10 million objects have been viewed online in the last 295 days and we are currently averaging 50,000 objects each day.
Museum blogging is taking off.
Jim S and I have been talking a lot about how blogging is an efficient way of generating a buzz around your museum’s content. At the Powerhouse Museum our flagship blog is really the Sydney Observatory’s blog. It has been charting ludicrous traffic – it now represents over 60% of the Sydney Observatory’s traffic and has been responsible for a 300% rise in site visitation. Most excitingly though is the level of audience participation. So far for 111 posts there have been a mammoth 490 user comments after filtering and spam removal. One post on the Mars hoax email received 135 comments.
I’ve been reading Charlene Li at Forresters’ work on corporate blogging. Their reports propose a framework for measuring ROI on organisational blogging. She summarises the methodology as a chart –
Within the non-profit sector brand visibility is the key benefit from blogging – brand awareness leads to potential future (real world visitation), and in terms of collecting museums and research centres, a general awareness of the nature of “what exactly it is you do other than exhibitions”.
The Sydney Observatory has always had a lower public profile than the Powerhouse Museum. Those Sydneysiders who are aware of its existence (and don’t get it confused with the Observatory Hotel) often don’t associate it with a place that they and their family could visit – let alone look through a telescope – each night.
Prior to the launch of the Sydney Observatory blog there was no way for the astronomers at the Observatory to publish sky-related news, let alone the discoveries of amateur astronomy groups affiliated with the Observatory, nor respond to sightings of fireballs in the sky. The previous website architecture didn’t allow for such ‘loose’ content, nor did workflows allow for such material to quickly edited and posted.
Now, though, Sydney Observatory features prominently in Google searches for related topic areas as a result of the content on the blog. It is also critical to understand that everyone who does a search for ‘Comet McNaught Sydney’ for example, and visits the blog (which ranks #2 for such a search), is now made aware of the existence of the Sydney Observatory, and its activities.
Here’s another excerpt from Li –
(from Charlene Li) Q: Is there a standard ROI for blogs? A: Nope – sorry, it isn’t that easy! Just as there isn’t a standard ROI for a Web site, there’s no standard for a blog. It depends on what the goal of the blog is and also how much investment the company (and the blogger) puts into it.
Q: What’s the best way to measure the effectiveness of a blog? A: Again, it starts with the goal of the blog. I strongly suggest that companies start with the goal, develop metrics that measure the attainment of that goal, and find ways to assign value to those metrics.
Q: But aren’t blogs risky? How do you take that into account? A: We definitely take risk into account by generating scenarios that show the impact of low-likelihood but high impact events — such as a lawsuit.
Q: Our CMO/CEO/CFO won’t let us have a blog until we can show him/her the definitive ROI of a blog. Help!! A: It’s not an unreasonable request — they don’t really understand the value of a blog and see just the potential cost and risk. By going through the exercise of defining and quantifying the benefits, costs, and risks of a blog, you’ll be educating your C-level executives while also demonstrating the discipline that they expect.
So, how does your organisation measure the success of its blogs?
Jim and I will present some answers shortly.
Pew Research Center: Tagging Play is a short report looking at who tags content on sites like Flickr, YouTube, Del.Icio.Us and the others.
I’d strongly recommend reading the brief report. There are some basic demographics in the report and short piece on what tagging means.
A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users — and 7% on any typical day — have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.
(via Russ Weakley)
Ross Dawson alerts us to an article on CNet titled ‘Newspapers search for Web headline magic‘, which has some bearing for museums and how they title their exhibitions, at least on their websites.
Dawson has writen about the phenomenon of different print and online headlines for newspaper stories before, and the CNet article brings it into sharper focus.
Pithy, witty and provocative headlines–the pride of many an editor–are often useless and even counterproductive in getting the Web page ranked high in search engines. A low ranking means limited exposure and fewer readers.
News organizations that generate revenue from advertising are keenly aware of the problem and are using coding techniques and training journalists to rewrite the print headlines, thinking about what the story is about and being as clear as possible. The science behind it is called SEO, or search engine optimization, and it has spawned a whole industry of companies dedicated to helping Web sites get noticed by Google’s search engine.
Let’s have a look at the exhibition names of some of our current exhibitions and their Google AU placings for a search for their key content.
Great Wall of China: dynasties, dragons and warriors
Search term “great wall of china exhibition”
Ranking #1
Search term “great wall”
Ranking not on first page
Other histories: Guan Wei’s fable for a contemporary world
Search term “guan wei exhibition”
Ranking #4 (after UTS Reportage story on the exhibition)
Search term “guan wei”
Ranking not on first page
Our new home Meie uus kodu: Estonian-Australian stories
Search term “Estonian migrants exhibition”
Ranking #4 (our Migration Heritage Centre ranks #1)
Search term “Estonian migrants in Australia”
Ranking #7 (our Migration Heritage Centre ranks #1)
Ecologic: Creating a sustainable future
Search term “environmental exhibition”
Ranking not on first page
Search term “sustainable living in Australia”
Ranking not on first page
Inspired! design across time
Search term “design exhibition sydney”
Ranking not on first page (Powerhouse Museum home page ranks #2 behind Sydney Design 06)
Search term “Australian design”
Ranking not on first page
Bayagul: contemporary Indigenous communication
Search term “Indigenous identity”
Ranking not on first page
Search term “Aboriginal identity”
Ranking not on first page
With the exception of the Great Wall exhibition and a small exhibition of Estonian migrants, it would appear that common terms used by the general public to describe the content of major permanent exhibition galleries are not ranking highly in Google.
This is not easily fixed.
At the Powerhouse Museum we have been pro-active with search engine optimisation (SEO) and this has been a contributor to the rapid rise in visitation accompanying the launch of our collection database. To improve Google rankings we would require a rewriting of the advertising copy created to describe exhibitions, and, possibly a renaming of these exhibitions on the website. Common search phrases and keywords would need to be upfront in the body copy, as well as in page titling and used throughout. Whilst “contemporary Indigenous communication” might be the most accurate description of the contents of an exhibition, it is unlikely to be a popular search phrase, and it would be prudent to ensure that more commonly searched phrases like “Indigenous identity in Australia”, “Aboriginal identity” and the like pepper the exhibition’s poster page. This is not just important to attract general visitors. If you are not using the search language of high school students and teachers then your museum’s resources won’t be visible to them in Google either.
Because Google also examines backlinks, or how other websites link to your pages, it would be important to ensure that the key themes were clear to potential linkers as well.
If you are wondering how to do this then you can check the wording used by other websites to link back to yours with this nifty free SEO tool from We Build Pages.
Like newspaper headlines in print now are beginning to diverge from their online counterparts, museums need to examine their naming and descriptive conventions to ensure discoverability of their content.
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.
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.
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.
Typical – the day I go on internet-free holidays is the day Clay Shirky posts on Second Life.
Shirky’s examination of Second Life bores through the hype generated by ever increasing media coverage (yes, even in Australia) of Second Life. He asks, pertinently, what is the churn rate of users – that is, how many people try and then never log back on? Comparing churn rates is the secret metric that is never discussed enough by those on the outside of social sites like Second Life (or MySpace or Last.fm or whatever). Those on the inside, that is the investors and business owners work hard to talk about users, sign ups and those sort of ever-increasing figures, whilst churn lies buried and undiscussed.
Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn’t really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer.
So here’s my question — how many return users are there? We know from the startup screen that the advertised churn of Second Life is over 60% (as I write this, it’s 690,800 recent users to 1,901,173 signups, or 63%.) That’s not stellar but it’s not terrible either. However, their definition of “recently logged in” includes everyone in the last 60 days, even though the industry standard for reporting unique users is 30 days, so we don’t actually know what the apples to apples churn rate is.
At a guess, Second Life churn measured in the ordinary way is in excess of 85%, with a surge of new users being driven in by the amount of press the service is getting. The wider the Recently Logged In reporting window is, the bigger the bulge of recently-arrived-but-never-to-return users that gets counted in the overall numbers.
I suspect Second Life is largely a “Try Me” virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use. Pointcast was a Try Me virus, as was LambdaMOO, the experiment that Second Life most closely resembles.
He also problematises the whole idea of 3D environments which danah boyd picks up in inimtable fashion (meatspace! so 90s!).
I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)
There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don’t think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there’s a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn’t be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments. People who feel socially ostracized in meatspace are good candidates for wanting to go virtual. But again, that’s not everyone.
If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.
Quite a few very experienced people have made a strong case for museums in Second Life and with a flythrough demo it is easy to get seduced. But I do wonder about the churn factor that Shirky focuses on, and I agree with boyd about the actual use of social technologies.
My team here at the Powerhouse Museum has been toying with the idea of a Second Life trial too – we’ve had quite a bit of experience with 3D environments and reconstructions in the past. But a museum is unlikely to have the resources of a Dell or IBM to do a media friendly product launch type event quickly enough in SL to make a significant splash – these things in the museum sector take months (if not years) to develop properly and by the time they are done (maybe) the hype will have moved on.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about data visualisation – both as part of the Design Hub project and to find new ways of opening up the OPAC data to developers and researchers.
Paul McCarthy put me on to Nationmaster which lets you compare various statistics by country and across countries. There are some nifty things you can do with it.
Swivel is the web2.0 version of Nationmaster. Swivel lets anyone upload a dataset and visualise it, and mash it up with other people’s datasets, and plenty more.
[old post content – The only troubling thing is their license agreement which may limit what some people might want to do with it. I should clarify that most web 2.0 companies have similar license agreements with users as everyone tries to figure out how to make money out of user-created data.]
(Update!)
Brian at Swivel and I had a bit of an email conversation following my initial blog post in which I suggested they might consider a Creative Commons approach especially when dealing with data supplied by the non-profit and government sectors. They have now updated their legal conditions following a meeting with CC. I’m very pleased that Swivel have done this! (Not to mention slightly excited that this blog has had such an impact – its readership grows and grows beyond the museum sphere)
Interesting reality check from the regular Pew Internet report in the USA (via AP/SMH).
A growing number of Americans are listening to podcasts, but very few do so every day.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project said that 12 per cent of internet users have downloaded a podcast, an increase from 7 per cent earlier in the year.
However, only about 1 per cent said they download a podcast on a typical day – unchanged from the survey earlier this year. The rest do so less frequently, perhaps only once.
