Categories
Digital storytelling Web 2.0

Learning from journalists and the media sector

Over the past while I’ve been talking a lot about museums becoming media organisations on the web. This is occurring at the same time as the differences between museums, libraries, galleries and archives blurring. Like media, museums are coming to terms with the need to encourage active participation and co-creation between our visitors (cf. readers/viewers), content researchers (cf. journalists), across all our delivery platforms including exhibitions (cf. tv/print) and the web.

Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian writes an article titled The pro-am approach to news gathering neatly summarises some of the issues that emerge when co-cretion is enabled discussing motivations, drivers and problems.

Third: community brings cost. Jay Rosen of New York University runs an ongoing experiment in networked journalism at NewAssignment.net. The community there has reported a story on crowdsourcing for Wired magazine and is now reporting on the Presidential race for HuffingtonPost.com. Rosen found an ongoing coordination cost: volunteers need to be assigned, enabled, moderated, managed, edited, curated.

There is also the cost to misbehaving citizens, the dyspeptic commenters who can ruin a conversation online and tarnish a brand. This, explained Robin Hamman from the BBC, is one reason why the corporation is moving away from constantly trying to bring the world to its site to contribute content and interact. Now it will also organise the conversation happening elsewhere, in blogs or in Flickr photos or YouTube videos. That’s one step toward what I think will be the next paradigm of online discussion, something more curatorial, built around quality and reputation more than quantity.

Fourth: the role of the journalist changes. Journalists need to become moderators and enablers . . .

There are obvious parallels here with the experience of museums and many of us are actively thinking about how we can train staff in the skills necessary not only in production, but most importantly, in the process of facilitating, enabling, and managing co-creation.

(hat tip to Tony at ABC Digital Futures)

Categories
Folksonomies Web 2.0

Information organisation as a video – the latest from Michael Wesch / KSU

Back in April, Michael Wesch at Kansas State University made a great video about the basic ideas behind Web 2.0. Now he has delivered another video this time looking at information organisation. It opens with a traditional ‘on paper’ view of information in the pre-digital age – library card catalogues, expert taxonomies, and scarcity – before comparing this with the current situation – and the information glut of the digital age.

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Categories
Social networking Web metrics Young people & museums

Why kids are moving to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and away from email

I’ve been watching a lot of people using computers over the past few months and it struck me how many of them were using web-based email services – the more tech savvy were on Gmail, and the more casual users gravitated towards Hotmail and Yahoo Mail despite their flaws. An even smaller number used webmail interfaces from their own ISP. Like all websites and online services, they all have their own specific demographics of users.

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Categories
Collection databases Digitisation Geotagging & mapping

Brantley on digital collections and the location-awareness OPAC

Peter Brantley over at O’Reilly has put together a short post on his vision of the future of collections – specifically those held by university libraries – which should have resonance with those in collecting museums.

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Categories
Collection databases Digitisation Folksonomies Web 2.0

OPAC2.0 – latest tag statistics and trends for simple comparison with Steve project

Another paper from the Steve researchers has gone online and is generating interesting discussions. It elaborates on the content of an earlier summary podcast. To be presented at ICHIM07 the paper describes some of the emerging patterns in tagging behaviour in the different interface trials.

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Categories
Interactive Media Young people & museums

A dress up game for children

We’ve rolled out another simple game for young children over at our children’s website – Play at Powerhouse.

This one is called Zoe’s Dress Up Game and revolves around the Museum’s two children’s mascots – Zoe, a girl representing the local community, and Cogs, a robot that represents the Museum’s knowledge and collection. The game is very simple – find the appropriate clothes for Zoe to wear for one of three different outings.

Zoe’s Dress Up Game is one in a series of simple website interactives used to build familiarity with the Museum’s mascots and children’s brand, as well as teach basic memory and computer operation/coordination skills. They complement a range of offline craft activities that can be downloaded from the Make & Do part of the website.

Categories
Digitisation

OCLC/RLG on access and digitisation

Late in August OCLC held a special event called ‘Digitization matters: breaking through the barriers, scaling up digitization of special collections‘ in Chicago. The audio of the event is now available on the OCLC site and is important listening for museums trying to come to terms with mass digitisation and the new access demands of digital users/customers.

Amongst a slew of excellent well thought out short talks, Michael Jenkins from the Met reads Susan Chun’s provocative paper in her absence. It is a great way to start things off. Susan emphasises the importance of keeping pace with users and their expectations, and not just scholarly users. As she points out, users will neither wait for us nor will they necessarily need to wait for us as in the digital realm borders are extremely porous. She argues that audiences require quantity over exacting quality and that this is now what really matters. This requires new organisational structures, internal capacity building and looking beyond project-based funding models. She uses several important examples from her time at the Met especially the Artstor/scholars license project and the lessons learned from it.

Download the lot to your media player.

Categories
Social networking Web metrics Young people & museums

Time spent on Facebook

Compete is one of several comparative ISP anayltic services that are doing some interesting tracking of how US internet users are behaving on particular sites and comparing them with competitors. One of their recent reports examines how users are behaving once they are on Facebook. We all know Continue reading “Time spent on Facebook”

Categories
Conceptual Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Jean Burgess on ‘Vernacular Creativity’

I first met Jean Burgess when she was writing about music subcultures and she has been a keen blogger and highly engaged in youth and their interaction with media.

Her PhD thesis, undertaken at QUT, is now available online and in it she explores the concept of ‘vernacular creativity’. Rather than seeing this as a ‘new’ phenomenon she traces it way back deep into the pre-Internet days (which too many of us have conveniently and uncritically forgotten). She uses the digital storytelling movement and the communities around Flickr as case studies for how networked publics engage in everyday creative practices – ‘vernacular creativity’ – and contrasts these to earlier practices.

Henry Jenkins has recently interviewed Jean and the interview gives a good overview of the themes Jean explores.

The main thing I wanted to explore and understand was the extent to which both lower barriers to production, especially because of cheaper and more available technologies like digital cameras, in tandem with networked mediation, especially online, might be amplifying those ordinary, everyday creative practices so that they might contribute to a more democratic cultural public sphere. I guess I was optimistic in that I went looking for evidence that might support that hope, and not defeat it . . . . I found that the spaces that were most rich in examples of vernacular creativity were at the same time constrained in certain ways, and each context was shaped towards forms of participation that served the interests of the service providers as much as they serve the interests of the participants. So in Flickr, the most active, intensive forms of participation seem to be taken up mainly by already-literate bloggers, gamers, and internet junkies. In the digital storytelling movement, there is a certain kind of polite authenticity that is valued, and the workshops are incredibly resource-intensive, so that they aren’t open to the ongoing, everyday participation that something like blogging is. There are always constraints and compromises, no matter how open a platform appears to be. So, I suppose, that’s the ‘critical’ part.

Categories
Conceptual Web 2.0

SaaS, FaaS, HaaS – Simon Wardley on open source and the commoditisation of IT

Mike Ellis tipped me to Simon Wardley who recently presented at the Future of Web Apps in London. Whilst that particular presentation isn’t up as a video, Wardley’s slightly older but very similar in content, presentation from OSCON 2007 is.

In a brilliant and witty presentation Wardley, much in the vein of Nick Carr, explores how IT services have moved from being a business advantage to a utility. He calls for an increasing focus on open source all they way “down the stack” (application layer, framework, hardware) as a way of freeing up resources and avoiding “reinventing the wheel” every time. The proposed “federated grid” in a “competitive utility market” as glimpsed in services like storage (Amazon’s S3), software-as-a-service (Salesforce) and even framework/platforms (Ning’s roll your own social networking service) arguably offers greater business advantage.