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.

So so so so busy

Okay, readers. I do my best, but November is a busy month in Best of 3's real life. So posting this month is going to rely on me pointing you to things that I wish I had time to read more closely, mixed with some random observations.

On that note - if your institution is still struggling with the why-tos and where-fore-art-thou's of getting involved with Flickr, check out this great discussion on the Ideum blog, with their thoughts on understanding the platform, making time estimates, working with the community & planning for problems.

You might like to follow that up by revisiting Nina Simone's thoughts on how much time Web 2 takes.

Nina also has a valuable guide to developing social media guidelines within your organisation. What I like about it is that it focuses on providing guidance and resources, rather than telling managers to freak out in case their staff are doing a Virgin Atlantic.

Go there, do that

If your institution's web presence currently consists of a website and an e-newsletter and you're wondering how to step outside the boundaries of your URL, look no further - do I have the conference for you.

The Transforming Cultural and Scientific Communication conference is being held in Melbourne, 5-6 March 2009. The conference is chaired by Angelina Russo, who works closely with Seb Chan (who's a bit of a rockstar, really, from where I sit).

You can see what the 2008 conference covered on the Social Media and Cultural Communication blog. The themes for the 2009 conference are:

Digital Change Promotion organisational change and new business models
Branding the Cultural Experience interactive strategies for brand building
Implementing a Networked Communication Strategy increasing participation through social networks
Social Media and Public Programming communicating discipline knowledge online.

If you want to get a feeling for the kind of things that are likely to be discussed at the conference, I'd take a look at the following:

> Shelly Bernstein (Brooklyn Museum) on the Museum's Web 2 activities

> Seb Chan on using social media, social media & web strategy, and resourcing for social media

> Seb and Angeline's slides from their Museums & the Web 2008 social media workshop (PDF)

And if you're not sure what I mean by 'web presence' as opposed to 'website', here's a couple of examples.

MASS MOCA, like a number of other American institutions, has a Flickr pool.

Kaliman Gallery in Sydney has just announced their Facebook presence. (BTW, Julian Dashper's show at Kaliman finishes this week).

Henry & Hank

Many moons ago, I did a stint on the front desk at the Adam Art Gallery. I always felt the Gallery was in a bit of a quandary - it sat smack dab in the middle of the student audience, but struggled to get the students through the doors (except for openings, and then they flooded in).

As a result, I'm a real admirer of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle. I met two Henry staffers a few months ago, when they presented a demo called "Reaching the Internet Generation using Interactive Web Technologies and NO MONEY". Realising that students are (in-phrase alert) digital natives, Henry staff understood that the web offered a number of ways for them to communicate with their primary audience.

Today, the Henry has a Facebook group and a MySpace page, and share podcasts via Henry Artcasts and iTunes. All these things take time, but only a small amount of financial input.

The Henry also has the very active HankBlog, which includes students who are doing internships at the Henry as writers. I really like the informal tone of writers like Jamey and Kira who report on events and exhibitions inside and outside and unrelated to the Henry. And although the effect is a little lost on a NZ reader, I also love the localness of the blog - I imagine if you were a kinda-interested-in-art-or-film-or-stuff-like-that student, you'd read the blog as a great way of finding out what's going on.

So, my learning from this? Make use of those students on your front desk. Start up a blog, make a digital camera available, lay down some super-simple guidelines, make sure YouTube isn't blocked by the institution's IT department, and set them free.

Best of 300

Interesting things in my feedreader this morning:

From the Guardian: 'edgy' is the new pre-eminent / innovative / significant / insert-your-favourite art adjective here

Also from the Guardian: a great article about artist's assistants, including Damien Hirst's taxidermist and Mark Wallinger's fabricator.

From Fresh+New at the Powerhouse Museum: a post by Seb Chan about social media in museums and galleries, including some interesting observations on how using social media - blogs, Facebook etc - might affect the way institutions have to approach resourcing projects, particularly in terms of staff time investment.

This was meant to be the 300th post to the Best of 3 blog - only I can't add. Thanks for reading anyway.

Maybe ..... you're gonna be the one who saves me

Lonely? Insecure in your social situation? New research says you should start a blog.

Susan Moore and James Baker, from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, ran two consecutive studies. Their findings, as reported in this ABC Science Online article:

"We found potential bloggers were less satisfied with their friendships and they felt less socially integrated, they didn't feel as much part of a community as the people who weren't interested in blogging," Ms Moore said.

..."It was as if they were saying 'I'm going to do this blogging and it's going to help me'."

[In a follow up study] Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.

The effect happens even if you're not blogging, and just hanging on out on BeMyFacebook:

All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.

Of course, this is all based on the kind of teeny-tiny sample size (134 self-selected respondents on the first survey; 59 on the second).

p.s. thank you for being my friend.

Self-reflexive musings

A recent article on Newosaur looks at the disenchantment young staff within traditional media companies are coming to feel as they realise that while they might be the 'knowers' and the 'doers', they're not the 'deciders', and can't effect (or affect) change:

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the strategic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

“In most organizations, the people with the most online experience have the least political capital,” said one mid-level online editor at a newspaper. ...

Members of the wired generation say the process, bureaucracy and caution common to most media companies steals spontaneity and edginess away from ideas that could be appealing to their peers.

“Management is more concerned about who owns the change than they are about creating change,” said the online newspaper editor.

O'Reilly's Peter Brantley notes that this could apply to young professionals in publishing and libraries.

I wonder if this is just as applicable to art galleries? Is this what lies behind galleries' apparent slowness in coming to terms with Wikipedia, or with blogging, with starting a group on Facebook, or even with just getting on Flickr (a quick search this morning revealed a lot of lovely exterior shots when I searched on Christchurch Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, but nothing that looked like it came from the galleries themselves. Having said that, check out this great set of photos of Michael Parekowhai's Jim McMurty installed at CAG.).

I know one person who quit their job in an art gallery because they just got so frustrated about the management's reluctance to make use of technology that was cheaply (or freely) available that would help them work better. At the risk of sounding doddery, there's a generation coming through that's incredibly savvy, not just about online tools, but about building brands and networks online. So how will galleries harness this?

folksonomy, blogosphere, blog, netiquette, blook, webinar, vlog, social networking, cookie, and wiki

What do these words have in common? According to a British YouGov study, they are the web users' top 10 most hated words.

Blog and wiki are four-letter words - Guardian technology blog

I dredged up this Guardian piece, which is now a few weeks old, after seeing a post yesterday by Lee LeFever of CommonCraft.

Lee wrote about his friend Kevin Flaherty, of Wetpaint, the wiki platform I use for Free tools for free lancers. After seeing the 10 most hated list, Flaherty commissioned Harris Interactive to do a survey, comparing 'wiki' to the terms 'social network', 'blog' and 'online forum'. They found that:

• 16% of the US online population are familiar with the idea of a wiki
• 35% are familiar with blogs
• 76% are familiar with search engines
• 97% are familiar with toilet paper.

Would a wiki by any other number smell as sweet? - Lee LeFever

The numbers really surprised me - if wiki and blog have such low recognition, then things like RSS are likely to be even lower.

I'm attempting at work to change this in a small way, through an idea called Byte-sized learning. Byte-sized learning consists of small, hands-on sessions, where staff pass skills and knowledge on to other staff who are keen to learn.

For example, I've run a series of half-hour sessions, teaching people how to set up and use Google Reader. More sessions are planned, on topics like social bookmarking sites, uploading images to Flickr, and using online services to deliver large files.

The dual aim of Byte-sized learning is to demystify Web 2 technologies, and to introduce people to tools that will help them do their work faster and cheaper. It's a small thing, but I think worthwhile.