Regardless of Google’s don’t be evil ethos, they are successfully slaughtering serendipity. For a while now, on most searches I do the only surprising results are ads. Most others in the top-x are recommended or shared or +1d by people in my social circles. The announcement of Search plus Your World hints the web will only be getting smaller as time goes on.
It made me think of a forgotten social network I probably spent more time with than Google+ and Facebook combined: StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon is the cabinet of curiosities of the web. StumbleUpon is the unGoogle, a curated collection of stuff you didn’t even know you were looking for. I stumbled around in the arts section and sawmoregreatstuff than in a week on Twitter.
With a population of 20 million StumbleUpon doesn’t have the body of most other social networks. However, unlike most other social networks, the users of StumbleUpon are open to chance encounters, welcome serendipity, and value quality regardless of its origin.
StumbleUpon is around since 2001, but I think its potential for museums is severely overlooked when we talk about social media. Ranked 126th worldwide on Alexa, the website is directing huge amounts of visitors to great content on the web. Plus, according to Wikipedia they added millions of users in the past year, which strengthens my believe that there’s a growing interest in content from beyond once’s social circles. Read the rest of this entry »
Last year – best wishes for 2012! – I got my hands on a copy of The Happy Museum: A tale of how it could turn out all right. It’s a happy little publication (PDF) I hadn’t heard of before about the role museums play in our changing world, and should play to remain relevant and add to a more sustainable future. And, hidden between the lines, there’s a twist in the story that takes is from society straight to social media…
In 2010, when asked to imagine museums in 2020, I wrote about how I believe a museum has and should have a responsible position in culture, art and heritage and also in society in general. The Happy Museum takes this further and focuses on the role museums can play to limit consumption, make people happier and generally contribute to the well-being of people.
The Happy Museum has two USPs when it comes to playing an active part in these areas, and I’ve added a third which I believe is equally important:
Apart from the gift shop, museum don’t try to sell anything but understanding and enjoyment. Therefore they are a sanctuary from the advertising and commercialisation of the public space.
As public (social) spaces, museums offer a counterpart to the ever more privatised public realm, where hardly anything is freely accessible anymore (especially when they are truly “free”, as in “gratis”).
In the world of StarBucks and Apple stores, museums provide an opportunity to experience something ‘unique’ in the original meaning of the word: one of a kind (not unique as in: venti triple half-caf organic caramel macchiato).
Quite some blogs are offering “best of” lists at the moment (notably, Expert Enough, Know Your Own Bone and Time’s Best Blogs of 2011), and I find these surprisingly pleasant. Also, even on blogs I follow closely I miss some posts, which then turn out to be the best. That’s my luck; to help yours, here’s the best of the museum of the future of 2011:
It’s great to see the strategic and result-oriented posts get quite some attention this year. Also, without Google I would have been nowhere (in terms of topics and traffic). Read the rest of this entry »
