A trophy, and some thoughts on blogging

Last night at the ONYAs awards, this blog won the Best Content (Personal) category. The very kind judges said: "“Courtney's inquiring mind and catholic tastes make this site a pleasure to dip into, or to trawl through at length: rewarding at every turn.”

I was so taken aback by winning that I did a complete Anna Paquin on the stage and lost all the poise I've worked so hard over the past two or three years to earn. In doing so, I rediscovered just how great it feels to be shit-scared by something (even if it's just the walk to the stage).



I was unprepared because I honestly thought either Ben Gracewood or Miraz Jordan, the other finalists in the category, would win. [My money was on Ben, because it astounds me he fits that site into his life alongside work and fatherhood, and the community he has built around it is startling.]

I was also unprepared for how I'd react to winning. It turns out that I still see this blog as a private (you know, for something that's on the internet) and somewhat amateur (in the old-fashioned sense) endeavour. The ONYAs are organised by the wonderful people behind Webstock, and supported by the same ardent community. I wasn't ready to have their attention focused on me. It was lovely, and readers who I would never have expected came out of the woodwork, but it was all most unsettling. (And - naturally - wonderful.)

I entered the ONYAs to give myself a kick in the butt about this blog. Best of 3 has been around for more than four years, and over that time I've learned a lot from writing it, derived opportunities from it, done some good things with it, and had some lovely and encouraging feedback.

Many of those things have dwindled over the past year. I was comparing notes with Robyn Gallagher (a fantastically talented writer, if you're not following her already). Both of us have noticed that comments have withered away lately, and we speculated about whether this was because people now click a Facebook like button or tweet out a link to show their reaction to something you've written. In general, blogging just feels a bit less rewarding than it used to.

The conversation came about at the Future of Blogging panel at yesterday's Wordpress Camp. I don't use Wordpress (obviously) but the organisers kindly let me drop in for this session, because I really wanted to hear what Julie Starr and Richard MacManus (along with facilitator Lance Wiggs and fellow panellists John Ford and ring-in David Farrar) had to say. In fact, I was so curious that even posted some question to the WordCamp site in advance of the event:

I occasionally run social media workshops, often in the cultural/not-for-profit/government sectors (for my sins, mind you, not because I promote myself as any kind of social media guru, ninja, prodigy or consultant).

I still regularly hear people say in these sessions that they don’t ‘believe in’ or ‘trust’ information they see on blogs (the quote I often hear is “I did a search on X but all I got was blogs and I don’t trust them”).

My gut feeling is that these people are nonetheless reading and believing materials presented on blogs (whether they recognise the website they’re looking at is a blog or not). But my question is – do blogs still have a reputation issue?

And an observation. I *do* believe in the material I find on blogs. I have learned more from reading blog posts than I did in six years of academic study. It’s been integral to the way my career has developed. And yet I’m quite worried at the moment that people are going to give up on this kind of ‘professional’ blogging, and the chatter is moving to twitter and facebook. What if in a year’s time I open up my feedreader and it’s bereft of tasty posts? Is the golden age of blogging over? (I guess that’s a question after all).

I am seriously concerned that people are going to stop blogging (and let's not even get into how worried I am about RSS). Not all blogs, of course; selfishly, I'm worried about the blogs I follow and get value from. When asked what the difference was between the way they blogged in 2009 and in 2010, almost all the panellists said they blogged less.

I have benefited hugely from the generosity of people like Derek Powazek, Seb Chan, Shelley Bernstein, Daniel Incandela, George Oates, Nina Simon, and Kathy Sierra - all people who have freely shared detailed and often entertaining accounts of what they do, how they do it, and what they think about it.

I have tried to follow in this tradition myself - more so, possibly, on my work blogs (first at the National Library and now at Boost New Media). I'm aware that I have blogged less here, and in less depth, since getting a regular spot on National Radio and since joining Goodreads. And at work I find it hard to squeeze blogging time in around client work. But the ONYA award, and the kindness of people when I won, has been exactly the kick in the ass I needed. From now on, I pledge to do better. Thank you all for being here.

Embedded

At last year's National Digital Forum in Wellington I met Liam Wyatt, Vice President of Wikimedia Australia and a passionate advocate for better engagement between Wikipedia and cultural organisations.

Let's put all the arguments about the 'quality' of Wikipedia aside, because they bore me. Wikipedia is not just one of the world's most popular research and vague-question-answering tools - it's a vital way, if you're a collecting or 'memory' institution, to share your collections and knowledge, and to attract visitors back to your own websites.

Liam popped up on my radar yesterday with this article in the New York Times, which describes his role as the British Museum's first Wikipedian in residence. Liam is (without pay) spending 5 weeks at the museum, building the relationship between it and Wikipedia. Here's a snippet from the article that gives one reason why this may be of value:

“I looked at how many Rosetta Stone page views there were at Wikipedia,” said Matthew Cock, who is in charge of the museum’s Web site and is supervising the collaboration with Wikipedia. “That is perhaps our iconic object, and five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article as to ours.”

Liam's just started blogging about his residency. As you'll see from that first post, full of bullet points and graphs, it's not something he's taking at all lightly. And fair enough. There are some (kept quite quiet) horror stories out there about engagements between Wikipedians and museum staffers, and Liam's doing his best to make something 'mutually beneficial, sustainable and replicable'.

In another recent example of embedding, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG is blogging from the Canadian Centre for Architecture for two months as part of their Visiting Scholars programme.

I visited the CCA, in Montreal, a few years ago. It was beautiful - the building, the shows, the snow, the light - and the archives were extraordinary. As Manaugh writes:

I will be writing about many of the items in their ambitious collection—films, models, photographs, manuscripts, architectural tools, and more—and publishing the results both here and on the CCA website.

There is a truly mind-boggling amount of material to explore up there, from the archives of Gordon Matta-Clark and Cedric Price to a collection of antique drawing instruments and souvenir models, John Hejduk's Bovisa sketches, photographic plates from English India, Canadian fire insurance maps, speculative proposals for river lighthouses, massive archives of stage set designs and dramatic scenography, and a beautiful manuscript copy of the Plan of St. Petersburg, among far, far more than I could possibly mention in one post. Konstantin Melnikov. Aldo Rossi. Three airports by Frank Lloyd Wright. Travel sketches by Louis Kahn.

Manaugh is framing this project up as a trial of the notion of Bloggers in Residence:

... there are architectural and design archives all over the world, full of astonishing things, but these same collections are often unexplored in their entirety, even by members of the institutions that have collected them. Even more commonly, many of these global collections are open only to scholars who stop by once every five or six years—if that often—to write niche monographs or academic publications about specific aspects of an archive's contents.

But what if you could install an architecture blogger—or a film blogger, a food blogger, an archaeology blogger, a fiction blogger—in an overlooked archive somewhere, anywhere in the world, and thus help to reveal those items to the general public?

I think it's a great idea. Professional and academic researchers use collections all the time for their projects, but I'd argue that whatever their output is, it's more likely to be written for their own objectives/purposes than to engage an audience. Whereas a blogger who sees their role as sharing stuff and getting people excited about it falls more into the traditional areas of outreach - a floor talk that you don't have to stand up through, that's accessible around the world at any time. And (you knew they'd be a segue somewhere, right?) done with sufficient authority, material for lots and lots of lovely Wikipedia links.

Let me be your fan (Part 1,000,000)

Yesterday I went along to the first day of the Engage Your Community conference (this afternoon I'm delivering a 3-hour workshop on using social media as part of the conference: my slides & resources are available here but you'd need to be at the workshop for the really juicy bits).

Many of the speaker touched on themes I harp on about a lot: Colin Jackson noted that the Internet has always attracted and fostered community; Chris Brown argued that social rules and mores are as important online as off; Nathalie Hofsteede talked about the web and transparency, and how it can work for you or against you. It was really interesting though to hear the issues, strategies and experiences I live and work with discussed through the lens of another sector.

Andrea Walker is the Online Communications Manager at Oxfam NZ. In her presentation she talked about Oxfam's experience of using social media sites, focusing on Facebook and Twitter.
One of the stories she told was about their Twitter account.

When the Twitter account was launched, Oxfam mostly focused on ways to drawn attention to our spread their key messages. Then one night the partner of one of the team came along to team drinks, and said that he thought the stream was good, but he'd like to know more about what's happening in the office. He thought he'd find this interesting.

Now Oxfam does tweet about workplace stuff - like birthday cake - in a way that still subtly draws attention to key messages (birthday cake made with fairtrade ingredients). It adds personality to their stream - it brings out the real people behind the brand, and it encourages real, human connection.

I enjoyed Andrea's presentation, and I was really glad she made this point. It matches with a point I feel like I keep banging on and on about - that people *want* to be your fans.

As an example; I've recently become a little bit obsessed with Berg's weeknotes blog posts. Berg is a London design consultancy who do things that are, frankly, a little magical and (often) a bit beyond me. [Tangent: Berg's work reminds me of Clarke's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic only it's not just technology, it's the thinking and the way they communicate those thoughts]

Back on track. The weeknotes posts are recaps of what everyone in the office is doing. For example:

I’m liaising with builders to get quotes for the conversion of the new studio space, with accountants to answer queries on the year end and move to better book-keeping software, and researchers for: Ashdown; Silicon Roundabout; cybernetics. There are two contracts to chase and two proposals to complete. I know I say this every three months or so, but I’m busier and more productive than I’ve ever been.

I love this kind of detail. It's a little irrational (I'll never work with these guys) but I do. The same could be said for Stamen. I guess the nub of this is: I'm interested in their work, and they give me stuff to be interested in - not just the final ready-to-ship product or campaign, but the human side, the stuff that explains what they do and how they do it. The stuff that makes me feel involved.

Why can't more museums and galleries do this? Some people would doubtless argue that they're to busy working to blog or tweet about it. To which I'd ask: are you really too busy to engage with the people who you're working for?

Round of applause

This week I've been admiring how Te Papa is opening up about its digitisation work on its blog.

Blow by blow, the conversation has gone like this:

Victoria Leachman, rights manager at Te Papa, blogs about a new batch of images of collection works that are now available online.

Over the net raises questions about how Te Papa prioritises its digitisation work

Leachman replies on the Te Papa blog* with an explanation that focuses on the (hey, let's be upfront about this) incredibly vexing issue of copyright clearance

Over the net responds with big ups and more questions ...

And today, Adrian Kingston is at it on the Te Papa blog with a lengthy and cogent article about digitisation at the museum, which touches on many of the pertinent issues and gives a solid big picture view.

It's not simply noteworthy that Te Papa is both fronting up to the questions, and using the correct vehicle to do it. It's actually bloody impressive that staff are doing the posting so quickly. I'm not saying you need to be this prompt, and this fulsome, with every enquiry that comes your way. But when the people who do the asking really care, and when the topic at hand really matters, you should. Congratulations, guys - long may it continue.


*Side issue - Over the net doesn't have commenting enabled; usually a reply to a post would be appended to it, but in this case Leachman did the right thing, IMO.

This week's crush ....

.... is Joseph Sullivan's blog 'The Book Design Review'. To quote a friend - it is the house of awesome. Check out, for example, this post bringing together a slew of recent editions of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ("most of them pretty horrible").



You can also follow Sullivan on Twitter: http://twitter.com/theBDR

Hat tip to the Te Papa blog for the link

A lengthy post on blogging

A bunch of stuff came in via my feedreader last week which has all added up to this - rather lengthy - post about blogging. If you just want to read about art, I'd recommend scrolling to the end of the post.

Blogs - here to stay

Technorati recently released its State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Among the interesting points

- Blogs and 'other websites' are blurring: "Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs".

- Your brand (read: gallery) is probably all over the blogosphere: "Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate). Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers."

- Not blogging? Dummy. "The word blog is irrelevant, what's important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world." Seth Godin.

Blogs - making you better at your job

Hot on the heels of Technorati's report, Read Write Web (appalled at the results of a recent Pew 'networked workers' survey) argued that reading blogs at work is a really good thing:

1. You get the 'First Mover Advantage'. Not everyone believes in this, but the guts of the idea is that people who know stuff first have a competitive advantage.

2. You know what other people are talking about. This lets you spot gaps in the market (and fix stupid stuff you've done).

3. You can learn from experts - RRW has a great post on finding the top blogs in your area of interest.

Blogs - some do's and don'ts

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of my areas of interest, so I follow the eminently useful SEOmoz blog.

This week's Whiteboard Friday video was about tips for corporate blogging. If your gallery/museum is still thinking about taking blogging on, don't be put off by the "corporate" in the title: it's packed with repurposable advice.


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Corporate Blogging Tips from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

The best piece of advice: don't just write about yourself. Join - or create - the wider conversation. Ed Winkleman does an amazing job of this; sure, he posts regularly about what's going on at his gallery and with his artists. But it's his "off-topic" posts that make him such a fresh and enjoyable regular read.

For those that want to read about art: a new blog

Check out The Paint and Bake, written by AUT undergrad painting students. The origin story is too cute:

One day Agnes and Elliot were sitting in front of the macs in studio with Julian Dashper, looking at various art sites and blogs and Julian Dashper said, "hey why don't you guys start up a painting blog?" and we said, "hmm dunno might be a bit of work..." and he said, "come on it'll be fun", and we said, "oh alright then" and he said, "so you'll have it up by the next time i come in?" (as Julian Dashper only comes in every two weeks on a friday) and then Agnes said, "ok", so here it is.

Speaking of Julian Dashper - check out the recent(ish?) collection rehang on the 4th floor at Te Papa. Three pieces by Dashper have been hung along with works by Mrkusich and Driver* in the penultimate room of Toi Te Papa, and a set of drumskins share the final room with new works by Chiara Corbelleto.

*There is a frigging spectacular Driver in the hang - the appropriately named Big Relief (1980). While I think the room would have been enhanced by including one of the relief works, or maybe even a small assemblage, it's still totally worth checking out.

Saying goodbye

This video on the SFMOMA blog showing the Sol LeWitt drawings being whited out (earlier post here) is exactly the kind of thing I want art galleries posting for the public to see. Thrilling and almost sacrilegious, it lays out the workings of the institution for all to see.

Best outreach ever?

Another week, another best ----- ever .

I'm filled with admiration for Christchurch City Libraries' dedication to online outreach. Last week, for the second year in a row, CCL sent a fully-equipped team of writers (4 staff members, I think) to blog the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. You can browse all the posts here.

Writers Festival aren't my thing (I'm always scared an author will ruin themselves for me). But the CCL bloggers covered the Festival with spark and vim (and MP3s). They secured media passes (or at least pass) and managed to interview authors as well as cover talks, panel discussions, and Noelle McCarthy's shoes. While I have no way of gauging whether people were following the posts (although there are comments on many of them, and that's a pretty good indication of strong engagement) I think the whole endeavour is worth it - as much as anything, because it makes you aware that the real live people work at the Libraries, and they love what they do. And I like that.

P.S Palmerston North City Libraries were also blogging the Festival. If Palmy can do it, can someone PLEASE blog the Melbourne Art fair for me this year?