Category: Young people & museums

Categories
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?

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
Young people & museums

Play at Powerhouse – a new website for children

Today we launched our new website aimed at children under 8 and their parents and carers. Play at Powerhouse. The site contains information for visiting the Powerhouse Museum with children; and extension materials, activities and games to engage children at home, around themes of science and design.

The team has done a lot of work in reducing the volume of information contained on the main Powerhouse Museum website, simplifying and targeting it at the site’s audience; not to mention the design and construction of stacks of activities.

This is just stage one. We have three more online games coming in the next two months as well as around thirty new ‘at home’ activities.

The site complements and promotes a whole new suite of Museum offerings aimed at young children including the wonderful Zoe’s House playspace.

Categories
Interactive Media MW2007 Young people & museums

Schaller & Allison-Bunnell on learning styles and interactive design

David Schaller and Steven Allison-Bunnell’s day long workshop on designing educational interactive media was one of the highlights of Museums & the Web in 2005 for me. It was a fantastic workshop and one that gets run each year (and always books out well in advance!). If you managed to book a place this year then you are in for a treat.

Scheller and Aliison-Bunnell have now published their latest paper delivering some of the research findings from their work.

Drawing on their earlier work (which made me track down Kieran Egan’s 1998 book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding), their latest research looks at the different types of interactive learning experience different groups of people gravitate towards, and learn from most effectively.

This work, and their earlier papers, are especially important for museums developing interactive experiences be it in the gallery space itself, or on the web. Interestingly, many of the new opportunities afforded to developers at low cost as a result of Web2.0 style tools, we may be able to better reach out to ‘social learners’ than ever before – but we need not to forget those who may learn better from other learning styles as a result of individual preference, gender or age.

Categories
Interactive Media Mobile MW2007 Young people & museums

Museums & the Web 2007 papers online / Fantoni on museum ‘bookmarking’

The first batch of papers for Museums & the Web have gone online.

Picking the first one to read at random, I chose Silvia Fillipini Fantoni’s paper on “Bookmarking in museums”.

I am interested in this area as we developed a prototype mobile phone object bookmarking application just over two years ago but never rolled it out. There were many reasons and in the end the greatest barrier to implementation was the resistance from teachers to allowing students to carry and use mobile phones during a museum visit. Another reason was the difficulty in finding a ‘free call’ SMS service number – without which users would have needed to pay for each ‘bookmark’ through their mobile plan (and unlike America, all you can eat SMS plans are not that common or cheap).

Fantoni’s paper is an excellent reality check for those building personalisation tools for their museum website with the expectation that users will surely want to bookmark things to come back to later. She argues that the usage of bookmarking tools is small, generally much lower than initially expected. Bookmarking is an activity not done by the ‘general public, possibly because of lack of awareness, promotion, and an understanding of what ‘bookmarking’ actually offers or means. Despite this, such tools may be useful for specific dedicated audiences – especially teachers.

Categories
Digital storytelling Museum blogging Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

What museums might learn from how news organisations are trying to engage communities

This week’s essential reading comes in the form of the Center for Citizen Media’s report titled Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement: News Organizations Forge New Relationships with Communities.

The report is written for those who are yet to become interested in the new opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 and contains plenty of global case studies and some very practical recommendations for those heading down this path.

Replace ‘news organisations’ with ‘museums’ and there are some terrific and practical insights into new ways of engaging audiences and in so doing embedding the museum experience in the everyday life of communities (and vice versa).

If you have attended any of my talks and presentations you will know I am fond of talking about museums as potential media organisations, and as platforms for multi-directional publishing and engaging communities. From the report, here are the four reasons as to “why news organisations should bother experimenting with user communities” –

– Regaining a place at the center of the civic conversation
– Enhancing institutional memory
– Reducing bunker mentality
– New stories, new ways

Sound familiar?

Here are there recommendations for anyone looking at rebuilding their online presence along the lines of increased community engagement.

Take risks.

In the Internet Age, it’s easy — and relatively inexpensive — to try new ideas. The cost of failure is low for any individual experiment.

Don’t merely tolerate risk-taking in the newsroom and on the business side of the operation. Embrace it, and the fact that failure is part of risk-taking.

[…snip…]

Approach community building with confidence, teamwork, and appropriate expectations.

• Confidence: Building an online community requires a different tone and approach than a traditional news site: personality, humor, and authenticity are key.
• Teamwork: Community sites have a better chance of success if staffers throughout the newsroom and the organization use them rather than being the province of a small “community team” that has little or no contact with the newsroom.
• Expand your team beyond your staff, and even beyond your site. For example, reward local bloggers who link to your site just as much as you reward readers who contribute to your site directly. Consider growing the “ecosystem” of local sites that link to yours as part of your mission.
• Expectations of Contributors: Don’t expect nonjournalists to feel comfortable taking on the role of journalist. While some contributors may be eager to write a “story,” others will want to share lived experiences. Finding ways to accommodate, encourage, and learn from contributors is key to success.
• Expectations About Growth: Communities are organic. They grow through the web-equivalent of word of mouth. Expect a significant period of time – as much as six months, maybe much more – before a community gains a life of its own. (If things aren’t working a year after you start, however, it’s definitely time to reconsider your approach.)

Categories
Digital storytelling Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Gordon Luk on avatars in games and social media sites / stickiness and museums

Gordon Luk has, post-SXsW posted some well illustrated examples of avatars and the types of available customisation that can be done in various MMORPGs and social media sites.

Luk is looking at the differences between ‘explicitly controlled’ and ‘implicitly controlled’ customisations. The former being those that are created by the user/player (initial picture, autobiography) and the latter being those that are generated or altered by the game engine itself. What he is interested in is how social media applications can learn from game environments,

avatars can play a large role in improving participation in games and social media, and can arguably go a long way into transforming one into the other. Building these layers into a community system can definitely result in game dynamics, and I’d bet that it would improve network engagement.

From using Last.fm a lot there it becomes apparent that part of the pleasure and stickiness of the site lies in the ‘implicitly controlled’ customisations. In Last.fm these are the automatically logged track and album charts that generate as you play and ‘scrobble’ music into their system (game), and the ‘neighbours’, ‘radio stations’ and ‘recommendations’ the system generates as a result. Through pleasure and stickiness comes an investment from the user in continuing to maintain their (in this case musical) identity on the site.

One of the things I am looking forward to in San Francisco at Museums and the Web this year is hearing how museums are encouraging stickiness and user investment in their proposed and in some cases, already developed, post 2.0 era websites. I expect it isn’t always going to be a ‘build it and they will come’ situation unless museums can get the ‘stickiness’ factor right with their target audiences. This is where I can see great merit in Jim Spadaccini and others work with smaller museums and non-profits, choosing to harness already existing, and already ‘sticky’ social media rather than try to develop their own (competing) ones.

Fundamentally the question is “why does someone spend so much time in a game world customising their avatar?”. And, “how can we get them to do that on our site as well?”

Categories
Collection databases Digitisation Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Demspey on ‘getting with the flow’, Morville on ‘findability’

OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey’s idea of libraries “getting with the flow” (from 2005) is something that has resonated well beyond the library world.

The importance of flow underlines recurrent themes:

– the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment

– integration of library resources should not be seen as an end in itself but as a means to better integration with the user environment, with workflow.

Increasingly, the user environment will be organized around various workflows. In fact, in a growing number of cases, a workflow application may be the consumer of library services.

For libraries, as evidenced also in the discussions by Holly Witchey at Musematic who has been covering the Webwise IMLS conference with regular session reports, and Guenter Waibel from RLG’s follow-up commentary, libraries are at a far more pointy end of changes in customer/user behaviour than most museums. Waibel raises the very hefty 290 page OCLC report titled Perceptions in which the survey suggests 84% of general users begin an information search with a search engine, and only 1% with a library website (PDF page 35/1-17). If conducted again now I would expect Wikipedia to rate highly.

Libraries are seen as more trustworthy/credible and as providing more accurate information than search engines. Search engines are seen as more reliable, cost-effective, easy to use, convenient and fast. (PDF page 70/2-18)

Where are museums in this? Is your content in the “flow”? Do users need to come to your site to your onsite search to be able to find it? If so, they are probably going to look elsewhere first, if they haven’t already.

Over at the University of Minnesota they have just held the CLC Library Conference titled “Getting In The Flow” with Dempsey as one of the speakers. There are some great summaries of the presentations including slides over in their conference blog.

Other than Dempsey one of their speakers was Peter Morville who some readers may remember from his first O’Reilly book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, or the less technically oriented
Ambient Findability (which has been doing the rounds of the office for the past 9 months).

Morville’s presentation slides are an excellent introduction to his work and given their tweaking for the library/information-seeking context are very useful for those in museums too. Ellysa Cahoy has some notes taken during the presentation at the CLC blog as well for the slides that aren’t immediately self-explanatory.

Categories
Digital storytelling Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Sub groups of consumer co-created content

From the marketing world comes this quite useful subcategorisation of ‘consumer generated content’. Indeed, seeing co-created content through the lens of marketing can itself be quite revealing.

(summarised)

Consumer-generated media (CGM): At its core, CGM represents first-person commentary posted or shared across a host of expression venues, including message boards, forums, rating and review sites, groups, social networking sites, blogs, and, of course, video-sharing sites. It’s commonly influenced or informed by relevant experience with brands (e.g., “I’m so angry with Jet Blue,” “I love Target”).

Consumer-generated multimedia (CGM2): This subset of CGM is more anchored to “site, sound, and motion” components, each with the potential to dial up the effect and persuasiveness of the consumer storytelling. Visualization elevates drama, emotional resonance, and the ability to prove one’s case through documentation (one big reason TV commercials have been so hard for advertisers to shake).

Consumer-fortified media (CFM): Unilever’s Dove Evolution is a classic example of CFM. The advertisers created the spot, but its meaning was shaped, or fortified, by the conversation, commentary, and debate that wrapped around the content.

Consumer-solicited media (CSM): The term that most commonly captures this form is “co-creation.” Others loosely call it “participatory advertising.”

Compensated consumer-generated media (CCGM): This is when marketers outright pay consumers to do certain things, or when publishers compensate artists or content creators for submissions.

Paid media: This is exactly as it sounds. Marketers buy media, usually in the form of impressions, to affect sales. Some call this “marketer-generated media” (MGM), but the old description works just fine.