Using Foursquare to make historical contents locally available (and reach new audiences)

Ever since I first used Foursquare I’ve been looking for ways to use this platform for our museum. After some unsuccessful attempts, I believe we found a way to use Foursquare that might have potential and some conditions to use the platform well.

Our new website, and especially its integration of Google Maps, made it easy to add stories from our website to relevant places in Foursquare. About a month ago I’ve added 15 stories as tips to Foursquare. And it seems to work! Some of the tips have been done relatively often and between 0.05 and 0.1 % of our website traffic (wow!) now comes from Foursquare.

Here’s what I did (and/or should have done, looking back):

1. I looked for things on our website (stories, etc.) directly related to a location.
2. Then I looked for a venue on Foursquare at this location with a lot of check-ins (train stations seem to work best) and preferably not too much tips.
3. I added a tip with the main body of the information of the story (the length of a tip is limited, so even when you add the core of your message it works like a teaser).
4. To the tip, I added a URL. The last couple of them I’ve given the extra attribute ?source=4sq to be able to measure them in Google Analytics. (There’s no other way to measure the traffic from Foursquare as far as I know).
5. I measure success using a special Advanced Segment for Foursquare (using the ?source=4sq).

Read the rest of this entry »

Charming tour guide versus mobile 3D AR app

Boris Micka advocates the use of technology to make it feel as if it were human. His most innovative tech projects cannot beat the experience of Russian babushkas who know everything about a museum. So what happens when ceteris paribus a charming tour guide and one of the coolest museum apps in the world compete?

The Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam

The playground for this epic museum battle is Rotterdam. This harbour town hosts so much great architecture and stories about it, past, present and future, that it really helps if someone or something tells you where to look. Last week I went on a tour through the city called Metropolder organised by the Netherlands Architecture Institute, NAi. The exact same tour is available in NAi’s UAR app, which uses (3D) augmented reality and Layar technology to tell stories about the buildings in the city.

UAR lets you experience the history and future of architecture with photos, audio and additional information. It also contains 3D models of some future buildings, so you can get an amazing feel of what the city will look like in the future. Sometimes with dramatic consequences, but I’ll get back to that later.

The tour I did was hosted by two guides and had some 10 participants. It focused on Rotterdam’s relation with water. Polders, harbours and dikes played a central role in most of the stories. The day was cold and a bit rainy. During the tour I tried to use UAR to find additional information to the stories told by its competitor: the real-life tour guide.

Read the rest of this entry »

Creating Trustville – A museum as community centre for cultural and social development and activity

This is an article I wrote for the (recently launched) project Creating Trustville. This project is a place for ideation of new social structures and the conceptualisation of the institutions of the future, started by Vandejong.

What is a museum?

Over the course of history museums have had to reinvent themselves a couple of times. Once they housed the private collections of kings and other leaders. Their audience: the owner’s friends and enemies whom he wished to impress. Then museums became centres of research, romanticised in the late 20th century in movies such as Indiana Jones. In the meantime museums had discovered their public role, often housing elaborate educational and visitor programmes.

In the early 21st century, with the Internet and the 2.0 revolution, museums all over the world flirted with yet another meaning for themselves. Visitors became actors. The recently launched YouTube Play project of the Guggenheim museum in New York exemplifies this change. Online video artists have a chance to see their work displayed in one of the most renowned museums in the world. It is my strong believe that by the year 2020 this paradigm shift in thinking about museums and their role in society will have had a lasting impact on the sector.

So, what will a museum be in 2020?

Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile media for cultural and historical heritage, guidelines and pilot projects

How can we use mobile media to engage people in cultural and historical heritage? Last week I co-hosted a hands-on expert meeting dealing with this subject. Our objective: to find one or two pilot solutions that we can develop already.

The meeting followed on the post-MW2010 unconference about mobile games for museums I wrote about two weeks ago. Experts of DEN (Dutch Digital Heritage), the Dutch museum association (NMV), the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam and Beeld en Geluid together with host the Museum of National History, came up with a set of guidelines for pilot projects. We used user profiling and a tour through The Hague to develop these guidelines and a handful of ideas.

Our findings below represent what we think a mobile platform for cultural and historical heritage should look like, using contemporary technology.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile games and museums, wrap up of post-MW2010 unconference session

Although the most popular location based mobile games, Foursquare and Gowalla, still have limited user bases, their potential is huge. At the moment, Facebook has over 100 million mobile users, a number that is growing with the second.

As a part of the official post-MW2010 programme, Paul Stork and I hosted an unconference session about mobile games and museums. These are my notes, please add your thoughts and opinions through the comments. I’ll add them to the post to create a full document on mobile games and museums.

What is mobile gaming?

Both Foursquare and Gowalla work alike. Based on your location you can check in to a venue, be it a bar, a museum, or whatever. By doing so you let your friends know your location, but you also enter a competition. You can earn badges, become the mayor of a place, score points, etc.

Read the rest of this entry »