Posted: April 6th, 2011 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Technology | Tags: crowdsourcing, Interaction, network, photos, semantic web, social media | No Comments »
Last week, our friends of press agency ANP launched their renewed online photo archive. That’s cool 1) because about a 100,000 professional photos are now available under a CC license and 2) the new website is part of the INNL network.
A bit more about 2. ANP has had its historical archive of press photos online for quite some time. Unfortunately, as often with photos, its descriptions and metadata are limited. We worked together with ANP on our successful crowdsourced project Nieuwe Groeten Uit… and decided to take this one step further in the new ANP historical archive.
The INNL network connects historical collections and communities. Many of the connected websites encourage visitors to add stories and to add images to these stories. However, scanning, uploading, or arranging the rights often are too much of a barrier to adding images. The ANP archive has photos about virtually every possible topic of the Dutch history that people can tell personal stories about, which makes them very useful for people to add images to their stories.
The INNL network could do with the ANP photos, and ANP could do with context the INNL network provides, so we decided to connect them. Now, when somebody writes a story or comments, adds an article or describes an event somewhere in the INNL network, and adds an image from the ANP archive (using the redesigned wizards for adding images), this become information about the photo for ANP. Thus, by using the photos, people are describing the photos. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: October 14th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Technology | Tags: audience, communication, community, connections, conversation, do's and don'ts, facebook, social media, tips | 6 Comments »
Facebook Like Button Stamp by design studio, Nation.
Facebook Like Buttons are revolutionising the web. There’re even rumours about Google going to use them in their search algorithm. Recently, at the museum, I’ve been adding Like Buttons to many of our websites and the results are significant.
Conversion is high and traffic from Facebook increased. Small and specific communities are built around projects, events and activities. We don’t have a physical collection, but I can see the same happening for objects in online collections.
Adding Like Buttons is as easy as copy-pasting. In fact, you can customise and copy the code on the Facebook developers website and have a Like Button online in under two minutes. Generic solutions might take a bit more skill and time (adding it to our 750+ activities in next week’s Week of History took about an hour).
With the ease and impact of the Like Button it’s an amazing tool for museums to connect with visitors and build useful connections online. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: September 17th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Technology, Thoughts about museums | Tags: conversation, do's and don'ts, information, social media, tips, twitter, unusual | 5 Comments »
Photo by Pieter Pietserse on Flickr.
I read a newspaper. I read a newspaper because I believe a bunch of highly educated people are better at sorting through the myriad pieces of news the world produces daily than I am. My newspaper even prints the best tweet out of 90 million sent every day, that’s how good they are.
Newspapers don’t converse. Newspapers send information. And it’s good they do so, because they’re high up in the information food chain.
By now thousands of museums are on Twitter cs. There they sit and chat and retweet each other and make good initiatives trending worldwide. They’ve been told Twitter (and Facebook, blogs, etc.) is a conversation channel, not a publicity channel. They’ve been told to listen, not to send. So they desperately try to engage in conversation and mostly chat with each other.
Museums on Twitter shouldn’t converse. They should send information. That’s because museums, like newspapers, are high up in the information food chain. Maybe even higher up than newspapers.
I don’t say museums should use Twitter to shamelessly publicise their events and opening hours. I mean they should sort through the millions of tweets, status updates, blogposts, etc. to pick the best things and share these in a meaningful way with their audience. They should respect their position in the information food chain.
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Posted: September 6th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Inspiration, Technology | Tags: advice, checklist, easy, guidelines, list, new media, quick, social media, tips, twitter, use | 19 Comments »
Update 09/17/2010: Added 4 new things to do contributed by readers of this blog. Thanks!
Last week some of my colleagues and I hosted a new media afternoon with workshops for participants in the Week van de Geschiedenis (“Week of the History”). During this annual event hundreds of cultural institutions in the Netherlands organise activities related to history. Over 250,000 people all over the Netherlands visit debates, tours, lectures, special exhibitions… I believe this week has an enormous new media potential.
Quite some of the participating institutions have zero budgets, work with volunteers and have limited or no experience with new media. Some of the visitors of the new media afternoon asked me what they could do with new media – taking into account their limitations. I composed this list of 28 simple things to do with new media for small cultural institutions to help them.
If you know of other low-budget, easy-to-do new media activities, please add them. It’s highly appreciated by the many small cultural institutions taking their first steps in new media.
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