Pinterest and museums

After dismissing it for several months (on the basis of adorkability overload), I've started playing with Pinterest.

If you've been hiding under one of those handy internet-rocks for a while, Pinterest is a social sharing site on which members create 'boards' of images gleaned from around the web, which can then be followed and liked by other members; individual items can also be 'repinned' from another member's board to your own. The site is very popular with designers, stylists, crafters, and the kind of people who tumble pretty shiny things. Like Tumblr, there's a certain element of look-at-me-and-my-exquisite/quirky-taste.

I started using the site because I wanted to see how heritage items would fare on it. Would they pique the curiosity of members? What would prove of the most interest (pinterest?)? Could pinning an item from a website lead people back to the source? Might all this lead people to start investigating heritage material for themselves?

More than a year and a half after leaving the National Library, where I worked on several channels aimed to open up the collections to a wider online audience (like the @NLNZ twitter account, and getting the Library on Flickr Commons), these are questions I still spend a lot of time thinking about. And, to be honest, I spend a lot of time scouring the collections, through Digital New Zealand and National Library Beta. I constantly find things that tickle my fancy, start a Wikipedia trawling session, puzzle me, move me: above all, I find things that require sharing.

So, I have started using Pinterest.

I'm only a couple of days in. I've set up boards for old photos of hats and hairstyles, beautiful commercial and social marketing posters, Kobi Bosshard, Karl Fritsch, and hotties from history (because I'm still disappointed about not being able to add Bob Semple to My Daguerreotype Boyfriend). From the little bits of activity I've seen so far, graphic design is by far and away the most popular content, and colourful also attracts attention (so more Karl Fritsch, less Kobi Bosshard).

If I were still at the Library, and not doing this myself, I'd be far more active - searching the site, following boards, repinning and commenting away merrily. As it is, the site's content is by and large not to my personal interest: I'm not going to while away time as I do on Goodreads.  I have started following a couple of existing (real world) friends, and following SFMOMA's It's hip to be square board (totally to my liking).

From my brief experiment, I'd say Pinterest is definitely worth collecting institutions' attention. It's easy to sign up (although it's interesting that you create accounts by authorising connections to your Facebook or Twitter account: you're a bit buggered if you haven't started taking those basic steps) (also, you have to wait days to have your membership activated - WTF?). The bookmarklet tool is convenient to use (and highlighting text on a page automatically inserts it into the item's description on the site). And maybe most importantly, copyright seems to be well managed.

The community rules encourage good acknowledgement of sources and accurate links back to the original item.  Individual items display their original source prominently. You can tailor your description to include all the source acknowledgements you like. There are ways of seeing all the items from a specific site. The Copyright page has clear instructions for anyone who feels their work is being misused. This won't be nearly enough for some institutions, but really - it's time to come play in the real world.

This blogpost has (painstakingly detailed) instructions for getting started on the site; this one identifies a couple of museums that are already on there. I feel like my (aging now) questions you should ask yourself before setting up one of these channels for your organisation still hold pretty firm:

• Why do you want to do this? What's the big good reason for doing this, and can your aims be achieved using any existing tools?
• What are you offering? Where will the content come from, and is there anything you have to do to ensure you can use it or make it?
• Who is this for? Who is the audience you're reaching out to, how will you engage with them, and do they want to hear from you?
• Who will be doing this? Any form of outreach needs staff with some time allocated to the endeavour, and a knack for tweaking people's interest.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's had a good (or bad) experience using Pinterest from an institutional point of view.

Ker-ching

One of the most thought-provoking things I read over the summer break was one of James Surowiecki's regular columns for The New Yorker.

In 'News You Can Lose' Surowiecki looked at the effect withering advertising revenues and the rise of the internet have had on newspapers. He writes:

Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

Surowiecki points out that none of the major news aggregating services - such as Google News - are run by newspaper companies, and that many newspapers have carried over a 'walled garden' approach to their websites, refusing to link out from their articles to other pieces of coverage or other websites.

Meanwhile, bloggers like me are happily piggybacking off the backs of newspapers, using their reportage as the basis for our own writing. (You could see this post as a prime example - at this point, I think it includes more of Surowiecki's text than my own). As he writes at the end of the article:

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

This got me thinking - what would I pay for?

In the Yes column:

• Google Reader (and possibly Gmail - which would become a lot more important to me if I lost my job)
• Twitter (I'd ditch my cell phone before I lost this)
• Blogger (I'd rather pay Google or Wordpress to use their platforms than pay a viewing fee for all the blogs I visit)
• Ma.gnolia (it's speed drives me crazy, but I'm in their clutches now, with years' worth of carefully annotated websites and articles tucked away there).

In the No column

• Pretty much any newspaper or magazine site. Although I read bits of them often (the Guardian most days, various US papers most weeks, Stuff and the NZ Herald when I can't help it) I'd be really reluctant to subscribe to any of them on a full time basis. I get most of my news from National Radio, and no single publication provides enough articles tailored to my interests to make a daily, weekly or yearly fee worthwhile. Except the New Yorker - and I have a print subscription, because I can't read that much online.

Which confirms what Surowiecki is saying: I'm a media free-loader, and currently I enjoy the best of both worlds. I use a news aggregator to pull together bits and pieces from nearly 100 sources, rather than remaining faithful to any one media outlet. And while I feel kinda bad about this, I'm really unwilling to change my behaviour.

BUT. For the past two years I've (well, we've) donated US$20 to NPR to help pay for the bandwidth that brings me the This American Life podcasts. I don't have to, but Ira asks so nicely, and I really value their offerings. So maybe there is hope.

Nothing but net

Or more appropriately - nothing to do with art.

Every now and then I find a new online tool that changes my life, in a large or subtle way. Getting a feed reader was one of those moments (and yes, I've tried to convert you before). It's completely revolutionised the way I engage with news, ideas and people online.

A subtle improvement: when I found out that in Firefox (and if you're not using Firefox, what kind of art-loving liberal are you?) clicking on a hyperlink using the scroll button on your mouse forces the page to open in a new tab.

My newest find is Google Notebook. If you do a lot of research on the net, copying and pasting chunks of text and URLs into Word docs for later reference, this will change your researching life. It's simple, lightweight, and being an online application you can access it anywhere - fantastic if, like me, you work from two different computers. [If you just want to save interesting web pages but your Favourites are overflowing, I recommend Ma.gnolia].

Social bookmarking - filing on the internet

I've never had a filing cabinet. Well, to be more precise, I've never used a filing cabinet properly, only to hold stuff that I don't want to look at.

Instead, all my experience of filing has been online - with Windows folders (which is great, because you can configure it exactly to your own logic, but falls down when other people are allowed to mess about with it) with document management systems like Hummingbird (which gets around the other-people-stuff-it-up thing, but allows no personal logic) and with bookmarks in my browser.

I've been experimenting with bookmarking sites, including the biggie, del.icio.us, and some that aren't as famous as YouTube, like simpy and furl. I've decided that my favoured option is Magnolia. I like the interface, they way that you get told who has bookmarked the same page as you, the presentation of the tag cloud. It's quite pretty and soothing.

What I want though is the best of both worlds - I want folders to categorise my bookmarks, not just tags. I want to treat it like a binder full of photocopying, with dividers and coloured tags. The Magnolia wiki shows that I'm not alone in this. Fingers crossed.

For other paper-lovers: a guide to making a notebook act like a PDA, from Creating Passionate Users.