Two big things have been occupying me recently and form the basis for my non-blogging excuse. One: I just co-organised a ridiculously exciting mobile conference in Bath called The Big M. I won’t talk about this more here – if you’re interested, go have a look at the conference blog over on http://blog.thebigm.mobi. But needless to say, it has been eating up most of my spare time in the last few weeks.

Two – and the thing I want to just quickly write about here – is that after more than a year of writing I’ve finally submitted the last draft of my book to my editor. Hurrah.

Here are a few slightly random observations that I’ve take away from the whole experience. These are my observations about my experience, by the way – I’m not suggesting they’ll be right for you…

1. This hasn’t felt like childbirth*

You know those loooong projects? The ones where you get to the end of them, send the final email / go live / etc – and then swear blind that you’ll never do that EVER again as you take up smoking and cry over about 10 pints of cider?

That hasn’t been the case for me in this instance, at all. This has been one of the most sustained things I’ve done for a while – writing every single day for more than a year – and yet I can say with my hand on my heart that I have enjoyed the entire thing – and not only that, I very much want to do it again. This has come as some surprise to me.

(* disclaimer: yes, I’m being facetious; no, I obviously don’t know what childbirth is like; yes, I was there; no, it didn’t hurt…)

2. Being disciplined is absolutely key

When I started writing I took the unusual step (for me) of deciding to be totally regimented with my approach. Here’s what I did – and please promise not to laugh – it worked for me

Right at the beginning, I knocked out a quick Google spreadsheet which calculated how many days remained between the current day and my deadline. I then simply divided things up so I ended up with a “how many words you need to write today” figure for all the time remaining. I also did a bit of maths to show what percentage of this daily target I managed to write on each day.

This did two important things for me. One, it meant that my big fear of an end-loaded panic a month before my deadline was easily avoidable. Two, it meant that I could bust a gut on some nights and knock out way more than my “quota” and then relax at the weekends and not do any writing at all.

As I said above, this kind of discipline isn’t natural to me, but – more by accident than design – it really worked. I’d recommend it.

3. Software matters (a bit)

Much as book writing is obviously all about content, the process by which that writing happens can obviously be helped along by the technology. I had the good fortune to discover a piece of desktop software called Scrivener (used to be just Mac, but now PC as well). It is specifically designed for people writing long scripts – and lets you do things which are very clumsy in “normal” word-processing software like Word: shuffling blocks of text around, comparing one block from one chapter with another, finding and replacing, section word counts and so on. There are probably other ways of doing this, but I for one couldn’t imagine the horror of working on a 60,000 word document in The Beast that is MS Word…

Secondly – it’s an obvious one but always worth re-iterating – backup, backup your backup and then backup the backup you did before you did the backup… I’m a huge Dropbox fan, and trust it implicitly, but that didn’t stop me making copies and FTPing them into hidden folders on my web hosting, emailing them to my mum, putting them on a CD, etc, etc. The disaster of loss was too much to countenance…

Thirdly – although this came as no surprise, it turns out my publisher doesn’t use any of the tools that would actually make their lives very much easier: in an ideal world I’d have had a shared Dropbox folder with my editor, compared documents on Google Docs and so on. The reality – of course! – was email + Word with tracked changes. What a missed opportunity!

There’s lots of other stuff I learnt as I went along but this post is in danger of becoming a book all of it’s own, so I’ll stop there.

It’d be interesting to hear what you think, especially if you’ve gone through this yourself…

One of the things that is readily apparent, both from this workshop and from many of the conversations I have and see, is that many institutions – museums, galleries, businesses – have climbed over the first hurdle when it comes to social media. Many of them – more than you would expect – now have a social media presence. Usually this is a Facebook page or a Twitter account, sometimes it is a collection of Flickr pictures, sometimes a blog.

On first glance, these networks are of value because of their enormous size. Facebook currently claims 500 million active users (that’s, what, about a 14th of the world’s population). Twitter has 200 million or so (or is it a mere 15 million? who knows).

At that kind of scale, though, these networks are just sub-silos of the web. Just “having a presence” on Facebook or Twitter means as little as “having a web page”. We all learnt a long time ago that creating a web page was merely the tiniest tip of the biggest iceberg and that all the hard work comes after that: maintaining, driving traffic, linking, content, content, content. These networks differ because of the ease with which they allow network effects to bloom, and they have power when there is a personal nature to the interaction. The size itself isn’t by any means a guarantee of success, and nor is the hype.

This is a big lesson that many institutions – and people, for that matter – are only just  beginning to learn. Social media and social networks aren’t a golden bullet. The ease with which you can set up a presence belies the hard and clever work that is required to maintain this presence.

The thing we talked about a lot in the workshop last week was about how you put social media into a strategic framework: one which asks “should I be doing this at all?” as regularly as asking “how should I be doing this?”. I’ve always argued that we needed a JFDI beginning in order to kick start a more strategic conversation, but the reason for doing it should be made very clear right at the beginning. I (shameless plug) talk a lot about this in my book.

Gartner casts a light on what is likely to happen in the near future: many institutions will fall down the trough of disillusionment as they realise that social media isn’t the save-all that they thought it might have been, and we’ll see interest wane as Facebook pages remain unfriended, Flickr pictures aren’t looked at, and blog posts aren’t visited. The people who have thought about things a bit harder and a bit more strategically – those who are in it for the long game – will weather this storm and realise that the ROI on social media comes later on, and only with more strategic thinking.

I’ve always been very excited by the possibilities that the hoard.it model might uncover. Not, as you’ll see from the paper, because this is a new or particularly original approach – screenscraping is as old as the hills – but because it offers up some rapid and very easy solutions to some bigger problems. These problems are even older than screenscraping: legacy content, no resource, little expertise, and they’re firmly entrenched in pretty much every web presence there is.

Much as the world seems to be heading along a Linked Data route, it comes back to me time and time again that however beautiful these RDF or RDFa or even API approaches are in theory, they mean little without uptake and critical mass. Simplicity of approach defines RSS as a success, for example, and even though it isn’t perfect by a long shot, it gets things done rapidly and easily and as a consequence has been a cornerstone of the Machine Readable Data web that we see today.

This post isn’t, however, about Linked Data – I’ll leave that for another day (let’s leave it as: I’m ready to be convinced, but I’m not there yet). However, one of the major concerns I have about the LD approach is that however you look at it it requires a fair amount of effort to make the changes required. One day, I and others may be convinced that this effort is worth it, but for now this still leaves the huge problem that we outlined in our paper: legacy systems, legacy sites and legacy content – all of it put together at huge expense and effort, and none of it available in this new MRD world.

I got thinking about the hoard.it approach over the weekend and started to focus in on the ideas articulated in the “template mapping” part of the paper. Lurking at the back of my brain has been the question about who defines the mapping, and whether there might be any way to make this more flexible: make it something an organisation, individual or even a crowd-sourced democracy might be able to define.

The idea I’d like to float is this:

1. A page, section or even entire website has a corresponding file which lays out a simple schema. This schema maps things in the html DOM to data fields using jquery-like (simple, universal, understandable!) DOM pointers. Here’s what a single field definition might look like:

DC.Title > $("div#container ul.top-nav li:eq(0)").text();

This example means, hopefully obviously: “the content at the DOM location div#container ul.top-nav li:eq(0) is the DC.Title field”

2. If the institution creates this file then they can use the “rel” tag somewhere in the head to point to this file and the mapping type – so for instance you might have <link rel=”simple.dublincore.transformation” href=”somelocalfile.txt” /> or even <link rel=”hcard.microformat.transformation” />. This means that any MRD parser (or search engine!) which comes to the page could quickly parse the content, apply the transformation and then return the data in a pre-defined format: XML, RSS, vCard or maybe even RDF (I don’t know – could you? Help me out here!).

3. If the institution doesn’t create this file, then anyone could write a transformation using this simple approach, publish their transformation file on the web and then use it to get data from the page using a simple parser. I’m writing an example parser as we speak – right now all it accepts is the source url (the data) and the definition url (the transformation file) but this could be much more effective with some further thought…

And that, simply, is it. The advantages are:

1. Machine Readable Data (albeit simple MRD) out of the box: no changes (apart from a rel tag if you want it) to the page. No arcane languages, no API development. No time lag (I’d see most applications reading this data in real-time – just an http request to the page which is then parsed)

2. Any changes to the structure of the page (the long-recognised problem with screen-scraping) can be quickly changed in a single defining file for the whole part of the site which has that “shape”. If this file is democratised in some way then the community could spot errors because of changed structure in the page and amend the file accordingly

3. Multiple files can be defined for a single page: ditto, sub-pages or sections can have more specific “cascade-like” files which are specific to that particular content shape

I know of two approaches which are similar but different. Firstly, the YQL-like approach to screen scraping which is very, very elegant but also a) specific to Yahoo! (a company not in best financial and future-proof shape) and b) as far as I know, can’t be specified for collections of pages but rather on a page-by-page basis (let me know if this isn’t the case..). The second approach which is also similar but in different ways is GRDDL. This is more like the open approach I suggest here, but has the problem of a) being based around XSL which therefore means the source document has to be valid XML and b) requires on-page edits, too

These are the only two conceptual approaches that I know of which are similar, but it could well be that there are well-defined lightweight ways of doing this which others have written about.

I’d very much like your feedback on this roughly-shaped idea. I’ll get the parser up and running shortly and it’ll then become clear whether it might be an interesting approach – but if you know of similar ways of doing this stuff, I’d love to hear them.

The one-liner for those that don’t have the time to go through the slides is something like this: I believe that although mobile has been held up as THE NEXT BIG THING for some time, we are reaching a kind of “perfect storm” of conditions where it is at last becoming a viable reality for many users and therefore something for institutions to think about, too.

This is as much to do with effective marketing and consciousness raising as it is to do with device or network capability: if you’ve tried buying a mobile phone in the last year or two, you will have been offered mobile internet; if you go to a mobile phone company website today, you’ll see smartphones, dongles and internet on the go on their homepage. It would be very hard to miss this kind of marketing push. Couple this with the radical improvement of mobile content, the beginnings of location-based services and the increasing speeds and capability of a “normal” mobile device, and it seems pretty clear that we’re on the cusp of something pretty big.

If you’re in any doubt, check out slides 25-35 of the presentation that Dan Zambonini and I did at DISH 2009, which have some interesting figures on changing mobile usage. With device replacements happening on average every 14 months, even the old-school phones that don’t support mobile internet won’t be here for much longer.

With this level of exposure, it’s obvious that museums and other cultural heritage institutions are going to be following along and getting excited about mobile, either building iPhone apps or creating mobile versions of their sites.

While it is excellent to see innovation in this field, I’m slightly underwhelmed by some of the mobile offerings starting to appear that seem to be more “because we can” rather than “because we should”, in particular the current trend (and I’m deliberately not giving any examples – you can go find them yourself!) for “mobile collections search”.

It seems to me that the single mantra which should surround any mobile web development project right from the start is something like “never forget: the mobile browsing experience is far, far inferior to the desktop browsing experience”.

Browsing a mobile website is generally not a fun time. You don’t relax when you’re browsing on a mobile; you don’t lose yourself in the content: you’re there in sit forward mode, and you want to do one of two things:

1. find some information and get out as quickly as you can
2. use the capability of the “mobile” bit of the experience to do something…well, “mobile”

The first point is a no-brainer, IMO. Consider when and how I might choose to browse a museum website on my mobile. The answer is not “in my living room at home” – if I’m there, I’ll go find my laptop and have a far easier and more pleasurable experience in sit back mode. The answer probably is (and don’t shout at me for being obvious..) but when I’m mobile. I’m out and about, wondering what to do at lunchtime, thinking about whether a museum is open or where I can get tickets or how to get there. I’m not on WIFI, and I want the information as quickly and as seamlessly as possible. I don’t want images, I don’t want interaction, I want information. And I want it right now. And – this is the painful bit – I really, really don’t want to browse the collections. Why would I want a second-rate experience of browsing content using a 2″ screen, some clumsy non-mouse interaction touchpoints and a slow connection? And – more to the point – why would I possibly want to stand in the street (being mobile…) and look at museum collections? I don’t*.

* Actually, sometimes I do, provided the mobile experience adds something. And this is where point 2 comes in:

If I can have an experience which augments my real experience rather than just providing a poor quality facsimile of an online experience - then you’re talking about truly putting mobile capability to good use.

So for example – if I’ve got a known location (and this can mean GPS but more likely in our museum context means “I’m standing in front of artefact X and my phone knows that because I’ve keyed in something to tell it this”), then now is the time for the museum to give me additional information about other similar exhibits, let me bookmark that artwork, or share it with my network.

mobile.nmsi.ac.uk - something I knocked out about 5 years ago and still live!

Some of the museum sites we’re starting to see are making use of this capability – check out BlkynMuse on your mobile (and note the immediate emphasis on “where are you on-gallery?”) as a good example; but there also seems to be an increasing number who are simply putting their museum collections online as they are in some kind of mobile format – either a mobile optimised site or (worse) an iPhone application, with none of the context-sensitivity that makes mobile a value-add proposition for end-users.

Much as I’m glad to see innovation in this space, I’d much rather see museums focussing on point 1 above by having a mobile-sniffing code on their homepage and redirecting to an optimised m.museumsite.com page with visiting information, than putting in a huge amount of effort into providing mobile-optimised collections search. At the very worst, museums should have the subdomain m.*** or mobile.*** and there have a script to strip out the images and so on. There are many ways to do this – here, for example is the Museum of London site stripped using a simple PHP script from Phonefier, or see these tips on how to create simple “mobilised” versions of your existing site with zero extra effort.

Once the simple and high-gain win is done, then it’d be great to see some location-specific and innovative approaches to “virtually collecting” or augmenting collections experiences. But the “browse our mobile collections site” without really thinking about the use-case is pretty much saying: “go here on your mobile and you can have an experience which is infinitely worse than the one on your desktop with absolutely no upside”. In other words, no thanks.

What do you think? Has your museum got a mobile site for visitors, or just for collections, or none at all? What mobile apps have you downloaded or accessed that provide museum collections (or other) information? How was it for you?

UPDATE (about 3 minutes after I posted this…): I just realised I utterly neglected to talk about gaming. Which, IMO, is where mobile (and in particular mobile collections) have a huge amount of potential. I think this’ll have to wait for a future post

Ever since I started working with museums online, I’ve felt that there is a need for strategic advice to help managers of cultural heritage web presences. There are of course hundreds of thousands of resources if you’ve got technical questions, but not many places where you can ask things like “how should I build my web team and structure my budget?” or “how do I write a strategy or business plan?”.

Facet approached me in July asking whether I’d be interested in authoring something for them, and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to try and answer some of these questions.

My (draft) synposis is as follows:

This book will provide a guide for anyone looking to build or maintain a cultural heritage web presence. It will aim to cater both to those who are single-handedly trying to keep their site running on limited budget and time as well as those who have big teams, large budgets and time to spend.

As well as describing the strategic approaches which are required to develop a successful online presence, the book will contain data and case studies on current practice from large and small cultural heritage institutions. This research will help give the reader an insight into how these institutions manage their websites as well as providing hints and tips on best practice. It will have an accompanying web presence which will provide template downloads and other up-to-date information including links and white papers.

As you’ll see, I have no intention of trying to do this all by myself – over the coming year I’m going to be on the phone to many of you (hide now!) asking how you do what you do, and compiling this into what I hope will be a useful guide.

If you have any ideas about what I should include, or the questions I should be asking – please do get in touch either via this blog or on Twitter at @m1ke_ellis!

As always (just like the argument currently brewing about Free), there are two possible dangers in any debate like this. First, we go into too much detail and lose the view of the house because we’re examining the bricks too closely. Second, we polarise the debate.

I’m good at polarising, being a bear of simple brain – particularly when it comes to copyright. Simply, I don’t think it works in many cases, and I think this particular example holds – on many levels – great reasons as to why not. Cross-country, cross-domain, cross-sector, hidden images, non-hidden images, etc etc. This level of complexity doesn’t hold well with users, and they will abuse, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Having said that, there are clearly two sides to this particular debate, and actually I think both sides are being pretty reasonable. NPG have offered medium sized pictures; Wikimedia has been on the case for some years seeking access to these (arguably) public domain images. The discussion over the detail in this particular case will ramble on; the legal threat will be sorted out of court; everyone will ultimately go away at least semi-happy.

The bigger picture is the more important question, and it is this: why are cultural institutions putting collection (images) online? I ask this as an open question, as un-loaded as it can be (given you probably know where I’m coming from on this).

The possible answers are these (none is mutually exclusive, by the way):

• to sell them / variations of them, such as prints, etc
• to increase exposure to them
• to increase exposure to the holding institution
• to increase ticket sales / physical visits to the holding institution

So with these in mind, I think the important questions in this particular debate are not about the devil detail of cross-country copyright or whether Dcoetzee “should” have done what he did. I think they are:

• does the exposure on Wikimedia increase exposure? (Answer: yes)
• does exposure of hi-res pictures stop people from buying them (Answer: unknown, but possibly not)
• does the exposure of the images improve the standing of the institution (as being a place that “has a great collection”) ? (Answer: yes)
• does the exposure of the images increase click-through to the NPG website (and hence, assuming at least some kind of connection between traffic and physical visits) ? (Answer: unknown – I’m about to submit a FOI request to see if we can find out, but probably yes)
• does the threat of legal action make NPG look good? (Answer: not really)

There’s some great questions here, which I’ve been asking our sector to answer for a while. Where is value in a networked age? How does virtual equate to physical? Does exposure increase or decrease physical sales (go ask Anderson or Gladwell this one…).

Just as a closing thought, I wonder if the NPG will be chasing Yahoo! for this YQL query or Google Images for this one? I suspect not.

I thought I’d use the session to talk about something I’m increasingly interested in – the shifting of the message about machine readable data (think API’s, RSS, OpenSearch, Microformats, LinkedData, etc) from the world of geek to the world of non-geek.

My slides are here:

Here’s where I’m at: I think that MRD (That’s Machine Readable Data – I couldn’t seem to find a better term..) is probably about as important as it gets. It underpins an entire approach to content which is flexible, powerful and open. It embodies notions of freely moving data, it encourages innovation and visualisation. It is also not nearly as hard as it appears – or doesn’t have to be.

In the world of the geek (that’s a world I dip into long enough to see the potential before heading back out here into the sun), the proponents of MRD are many and passionate. Find me a Web2.0 application without an API (or one “on the development road-map”) and I’ll find you a pretty unusual company.

These people don’t need preaching at. They’re there, lined up, building apps for Twitter (to the tune of 10x the traffic which visits twitter.com), developing a huge array of services and visualisations, graphs, maps, inputs and outputs.

The problem isn’t the geeks. The problem is that MRD needs to move beyond the realm of the geek and into the realm of the content owner, the budget holder, the strategist, for these technologies to become truly embedded. We need to have copyright holders and funders lined up at the start of the project, prepared for the fact that our content will be delivered through multiple access routes, across unspecified timespans and to unknown devices. We need our specifications to be focused on re-purposing, not on single-point delivery. We need solution providers delivering software with web API’s built in. We need to be prepared for a world in which no-one visits our websites any more, instead picking, choosing and mixing our content from externally syndicated channels.

In short, we now need the relevant people evangelising about the MRD approach.

Geeks have done this well so far, but now they need help. Try searching on “ROI for API’s” (or any combination thereof) and you’ll find almost nothing – very little evidence outlining how much API’s cost to implement, what cost savings you are likely to see from them; how they reduce content development time; few guidelines on how to deal with syndicated content copyright issues.

Partly, this knowledge gap is because many of the technologies we’re talking about are still quite young. But a lot of the problem is about the communication of technology, the divided worlds that Nick Poole (Collections Trust) speaks about. This was the core of my presentation: ten reasons why MRD is important, from the perspective of a non-geek (links go to relevant slides and examples in the slide deck):

1. Content is still king
2. Re-use is not just good, it’s essential
3. “Wouldn’t it be great if…”: Life is easier when everyone can get at your data
4. Content development is cheaper
5. Things get more visual
6. Take content to users, not users to content (“If you build it, they probably won’t come”)
7. It doesn’t have to be hard
8. You can’t hide your content
9. We really is bigger and better than me
10. Traffic

All this is is a starter for ten. Bigger, better and more informed people than me probably have another hundred reasons why MRD is a good idea. I think this knowledge may be there – we just need to surface and collect it so that more (of the right) people can benefit from these approaches.

I’ve known about this project for a long while – when I was at the Science Museum, very initial discussions were taking place at the V&A about how to search and display collections results from more than one institution. The Science Museum were invited to take part in the project, but in the end didn’t because of resourcing and budgetary issues.

My second touch on the project was from the agency end – the ITT briefly crossed my desk at my current employer, Eduserv. We considered bidding, but in the end decided that it wasn’t a project we could deliver satisfactorily given the particulars of the scope and budget.

Back then – and I think now, although someone from NMOLP will have to confirm – the project was divided into two main sections: a series of “webquests” (online learning experiences, essentially) and a cross-museum collections search. The webquests can be seen here, but I’m not going to consider these in this post because I haven’t had time to spend enough time playing to have an opinion yet.

The Creative Spaces site is at http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ – at first glance, it’s clean and nicely designed, with a bit of a web2.0 bevel thing going on. It’s certainly visually more pleasing than many museum web projects I’ve seen. The search is quick, and there’s at least a surface appearance of “real people” on the site. I hesitate to use the word “community” for reasons that I’ll highlight in a minute.

Design aside, I have some fairly big issues with the approach that is being taken here:

Firstly, this site, much like Europeana (which I’ll get my teeth into in a future post…) seemingly fails to grasp what it is about the web that makes people want to engage. I’m very surprised that we’re this many years into the social web and haven’t learnt about the basic building blocks for online communities, and are apparently unable to take a step back from our institutional viewpoint and think like a REAL user, not a museum one. Try looking at this site with a “normal person” hat on. Now ask yourself: “what do I want to DO here?” or “how can this benefit me?” or “how can I have fun”? Sure, you can create a “notebook” or a “group” (once you’ve logged in, obviously..). The “why” is unclear.

I’m also interested at how underwhelming the technology is. Take a look at www.ingenious.org.uk – a NOF digitise project which I worked on maybe 5-6 years ago. Now, I’m not over-proud of this site – it took ages, nearly killed a few people from stress, and the end result could be better, but hey – it has cross collections search, you can send an e-card, you can save things to your lightbox, you can create a web gallery. And this was more than five years ago. Even then, I was underwhelmed by what we managed to do. NMOLP doesn’t seem to have pushed the boundary beyond this at all, and as museums I think we should always be looking to drive innovation forward.

Secondly, I’m not sure that there is a reason why. Why would I possibly want to create a profile? Where is my incentive? Here’s Wikipedia talking about the Network Effect:

“A more natural strategy is to build a system that has enough value without network effects, at least to early adopters. Then, as the number of users increases, the system becomes even more valuable and is able to attract a wider user base. Joshua Schachter has explained that he built Del.icio.us along these lines – he built an online system where he could keep bookmarks for himself, such that even if no other user joined, it would still be valuable to him“

The other day, I had a Twitter conversation with Giv Parvaneh, the Technical Manager at NMOLP regarding this post, which talks about “monetizing” media. He blogged his response here. Now, we had a minor crossed-wires moment (it’s hard to discuss in 140 chrs) – but my point was not that museums should “monetize” everything (although, I DO think that museums should learn about real business practices, but that’s another post altogether). My point was that users need to feel special to take part. They need to be part of a tribe, a trusted group who can do and say things that they find personally useful. They need experiences with integrity. If you’re not sure what I mean, just spend some time on the Brooklyn Museum collections pages. These guys get it – the “posse“, the “tag game“, the openness. Compare this back to what feels like a shallow experience you get on NMOLP. Now ask yourself – “where would I spend MY time?”.

The second major reason is that, once again, we’re failing to take our content to our users. This is a huge shortfalling of Europeana. People want experiences on their own terms, not on ours. Let’s not have another collections portal. Spend your social media money adding and updating entries on Wikipedia, or create an object sharing Facebook application. Or just put everything on Flickr. And, please, please create an API or at the very least an OpenSearch feed. If the issue is something around copyright – go back to your funders and content providers and sit them down in front of Google images for an hour so they can begin to understand how the internet works, before renegotiating terms with them!

The final reason hangs off the search facility. My vested interest here is of course hoard.it – and if you want to hear our rantings about the money spent on big, bad technology projects, then keep an eye out for our Museums and the Web Paper. We aren’t necessarily suggesting that the hoard.it approach should be the technology behind cross-collections searching. But we are suggesting that the approch that NMOLP have taken is expensive, old, clunky and ultimately flawed. Although it is a trifle over-simplistic as a response, why not just spend £20-30k on a Google Search Appliance and simply spider the sites. Why re-develop the wheel and build search from scratch?

If I was less of a grumpy old man, I’d feel bad about being this negative – I like the people involved, I like the institutions, and I understand the reasons why (museum) projects spiral into directions you probably wouldn’t ever choose. But then I remember that this site cost taxpayers just short of £2 million pounds, and that Europeana will cost €120 million. And then I realise that we have an obligation to keep badgering, nagging and criticising until we start to get these things right.

At the end of the day, Frankie sums it all up much more succinctly in his email to the MCG list than I do in this post. He simply asks: why?

This talk – “Why the Social Web is here to stay (and what to do about it)” is an expansion on the one I did in December last year at Online Information. That one focused a bit more on the enterprise, wheras this one was specifically pitched at cultural heritage.

The message is much the same: connecting with others is deeply important to people. The social web connects people. Therefore, the social web is deeply important…

Anyway. Here are the slides

Over the last few weeks in particular, we’ve seen the public finally sitting up and noticing Twitter. It’s been on the BBC, all over the news and makes for interesting watching on Google Trends, too:

Twitter / UK / 12 months

About a year ago, my assessment of so-called “lifestreaming” was that it was all a timesink. Back then, I hadn’t pulled as deeply on the Twitter crack pipe as I have since, or do now. Looking back (nearly 5,000 tweets and 300 followers in), my thoughts are on the one hand changed – radically – and on the other, mostly the same.

My views have changed in terms of signal / noise ratio because Twitter has deeply, deeply affected me, the way I work and the way I consume and receive content and news. I can’t think of a technology that comes even close. The panic – and it is panic – that I feel when I consider a world without Twitter is, actually, pretty worrying.

On the other hand, my views about institutional Twitter have changed only a little. Back then, I questioned that Twitter has a place at all in an institutional setting. Now, with some water under the bridge, I’ve tuned my assessment of this. My current take on this is that there are only a few ways in which institutions can create convincing, fun, and followable Twitter streams.

The first of these is when it is automated (for example, Towerbridge – and this particular example is a genius use of various bits of technology). The second is at the opposite end of the spectrum, and that is when institutions are given personality, usually because the person doing the tweeting can sit outside the corporate MarketingFluff (TM). The obvious example is the always-great Brooklyn Museum. The third is when it is just plain useful, giving rapid updates on a topic in a way that other channels can’t.

As the interest grows, we’re starting to see the cultural sector increasingly wanting a slice of the pie, and the first thing they’re asking is how do we engage with this new channel? How do we mix it into our offering and make it work for us?

Right now, many of the museums on Twitter are using it in an informal, below-the-radar context. The problem is that as the thing goes more mainstream, we’re likely to see the same old problem we’ve seen with institutional blogging: it just ends up becoming the same old shit from marketing leaflets, regurgitated into new channels.

Twitter, like blogging, needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness. As long as institutions can retain this – i.e., do it for a reason – then, IMO, things will get more interesting. If they don’t, we’ll probably all be unfollowing museums as quickly as we can slide down the steep, slippery trough of disillusionment…