::decloaking::

Back in October we went to our local orchard to pick up a nice plump pumpkin to to carve for Halloween. On the way out I snapped this sign. I’d already known about this from a local foodie who tweets, but it was nice to see how they were letting people know about it in their physical location. A few days later, riding the bus to campus I saw an advert (one of the big ones that goes on the back of our buses) for our local historic theater The Virginia. Down in the lower corner, you guessed it, were the Facebook and Twitter logos. It happened again last night at the movies. As I stood waiting for my popcorn, the monitor behind the concession played a National Guard promo – also featuring the Facebook logo.

Wait a minute…this was something different. People are essentially paying to advertise for Facebook, Twitter, etc.. And if you think about it, this kind of promiscuous branding has been part of “web 2.0″ since the start. Please! Steal my logo! Make it go Viral!

I’ve been working since 2001 on various projects that aggregate metadata from many many many different libraries, archives and museums. One of the consistent fears that I’ve heard over the years is that such aggregations will dilute branding of a particular institution. People have asked to make sure their logo was next to images that appeared in the aggregation. This seems like a pretty reasonable request until – as an aggregator – you sit down and try to aggregate logos from several hundred cultural institutions. Which one should I use? Where is it? Here’s one on the home page, but do I have permission to use it? – all the legalize suggests they will kill my family if I touch their logo. The marketing people e-mailed me a 20 page “graphic identity” PDF with rules for using the logo. Aww..frak it’s just embedded in this glitzy header image and it will take me 10 minutes to photoshop it out.

I would love – LOVE – to be able to put together a “logos of culture 2.0″ panel like the one above but my experience suggests that this will be a huge time sink. I know, it’s kinda gimmicky, but I think it would make a nice poster for my office.

Also as we’ve worked on museum dashboard prototypes, people have ASKED us to add the logo from an institution on collection-level descriptions. We’re also working on new prototypes for our Opening History interfaces and have imagined that it would be nice to included a logo from the hosting or contributing institutions. In the current environment, that’s not likely to happen – but what about next generation aggregations/APIs, etc. Can I retrieve your logo to go along with the data I harvest? Really, I don’t want to steal your brand – I want to help promote yours!

I can also imagine trying this using a little bit of hoard.it moxy – essentially scraping anything with a filename that looks like “logo” out of museum websites. I wonder what I would catch in my dragnet.

Not being a marketing type I have a few questions for you, dear reader:

1. Are there discussions about how to liberate our logos in this way? Or are we still trying to “protect our brand” by making it difficult?
2. Good examples of institutions who have done this? Can I make a badge for my blog/website with your museum’s logo?
3. What would be some reasons NOT to do this? Or perhaps ways to do this other than using your “official” logo?

Web 2.0 logos courtesy Ludwig Gatzke