Wow! It is great to see all the energy that the MCN conference generated! I participated in a panel moderated by Günter Waibel, which also included Robin Dowden talking about the Walker Art Museum blogs, Jeff Gates from EyeLevel, and Jenn Riley who writes a professional blog – The Inquiring Librarian and contributes to a collaborative blog TechEssence.
Interestingly we had some time to talk with the attendees afterwards about Musematic and about blogs in general. Almost everyone in the audience, indicated that they were not really interested in more blogs like Musematic – what I called “pro2pro” blogs – but were interested in “museum2people” blogs. The efforts at the Walker have been impressive from the get-go and it was interesting to hear just how wide-spread blogging has become within the Walker. I’m still curious why few people indicated interest in pro2pro blogs. Yes, there’s the too busy and overworked already argument – I use it all the time myself – but the value in sharing information on the cutting edge seems worthwhile. If you’re not convinced, go read fresh+new. Jenn Riley mentioned the value of her blog as a sounding board as she’s working through ideas. I still think this requires a critical mass of readers/bloggers that we haven’t reached yet and most of the think pieces seem to appear on museum-related listservs.
The folks over at TechSoup already have a great Introduction to Weblogs and IdealWare has review the top blogging software packages in Getting Started with Blogging. If you have questions about blogging from a museum perspective, the New Media Initiatives blog (at the Walker) discusses how they do it so well. Feel free to post additional questions to the comments and we’ll try to find you the answers.
During our chat we asked attendees what they thought about Musematic. Most people felt the less formal, off-the-cuff posts worked better for this medium and they encouraged us to keep it up (you can see the results of this encouragement below…). In a comment on Holly’s post someone asked about how Musematic is managed. Currently there is a Steering Committee comprised of representatives from both MCN and the AAM Media and Technology Committee. The committee has mostly been involved in arranging for hosting, contacting contributors outside of the steering committee, and contributing posts. We decided early on to be hands-off regarding what our contributors wrote. As an experiment we felt it would be better to let people run free with their ideas. Except for occasional prodding when things get quiet, contributors are free to do as they please. At our meeting, we did discuss adopting some loose guidelines such as those developed at the Walker as a formality. So far we haven’t needed them.
We were encouraged by the feedback at the session and will be discussing shaking things up a little, possibly bringing in some new voices and developing some dialogs with other museum blogs.
To that end you’ll notice a few changes today:
- Added an archive list so newbies can easily get to earlier posts
- The folks over at museumblogs.org released a syndication of their museum blog directory that now appears below the search box. Jim mentions the OPML import in his post, but I wanted to be sure that the list was up to date as new blogs were added. I’ve sucked an alternate RSS feed using the handy feedList plugin for WP.
- At the bottom of this post should appear links to several social bookmarking sites. Click on the icon and it should send the link there for your enjoyment and tagging pleasure. I should not that last year Brian Cors started a Ma.gnolia group for MCN, but it has seen little use. Take a gander and consider adding your bookmarks.
I’ll also be looking at using some more accessibility friendly WP templates, if anyone has recommendations for WAI compliant WP templates, drop me a line.
November 21st, 2006 03:58
Hmmm….the sociable links aren’t appearing on the main template, but as you can see they arer appearing on this template. Will have to fix that…
November 21st, 2006 11:56
Richard, I just created a group in ma.gnolia for the MCN IP SIG (called, appropriately enough the “MCN IP SIG”). It was one of the ideas that surfaced at the IP SIG meeting at the annual conference. Perhaps people would be more inclined to contribute bookmarks to more focused groups (such as SIGs) rather than a broader MCN-wide group? I’ll let you know how it fares in a couple of weeks…..
November 21st, 2006 05:58
Ooooh. I love the museumblogs.org syndication there. Nice addition.
That particular session was really one my favourites at the conference. I was amazed at the success of the Walker’s blog – 2nd most visited portion of their website. Wow!! The thing I really like about museum blogging is that it’s a way to connect with a potentially new audience (younger people, and those living outside of your immediate area) that doesn’t cost much!
December 1st, 2006 11:37
I think part of the reason that there’s more interest in museum2people blogs is that it fits in with what people are already doing as part of their job and it’s easy to visualize the goal of a blog like that. (for example communication with the public about the institution) Fewer people are in positions where it’s ‘officially’ part of their position to communicate pro2pro type of information, and people tend to use listservs for that (I’m in an organization in which sharing information pro2pro is part of what we do, although we actually we do both types of communication) So I’d say it comes down to lack of time and people using an established vehicle (either listservs or e-mail to individuals) for this type of communication.
I think people are interested in reading blogs such as this one, but perhaps less interested in writing comments. (using the 1% rule of thumb) I know personally I read a lot of blogs that I may not be moved to comment on, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t have an ‘aha’ moment, nor that I didn’t get value out of reading it.
I’m interested in how one evaluates the success of blogs. If your purpose is just to pass along information, then you can look at user numbers. If the intention of your blog is to enter a dialogue, then you have to look at different aspects.
Sorry for the long comment, I just got on a bit of a roll.
January 2nd, 2007 05:31
This is a bit of a late reply, but its made me realize that we’re missing a feed for comments here. Now added to my to-do list.
In the meantime, I’ve written about the Museum Blog survey that may provide some insights.