Archive for July, 2007

by Che Tibby

When my television looked like it was going to pack up last year, I did the respectable thing and sold it to someone on TradeMe. It was a 68cm behemoth that perched on a slab on the corner of the room and fed me a constant stream of bull-pucky interspersed with the occasional gem. It took two people to lift and move it. It consumed a huge amount of electricity. And I loved it to bits.

Of late though, I’m come to see that co-dependent relationship with the tube to be extremely unhealthy. Sure it keep me amused on demand. It was a companion when I was alone, and didn’t mind that I gorged myself on chips and soft drinks (with the obvious results). It didn’t mind if I had dandruff or had forgotten to shower. It didn’t mind if I dressed for any particular occasion in my trackies and an old t-shirt. And most importantly, it didn’t starve if I switched it off and went away for the weekend.

It was what I got from out of the television that was the problem. A stream of what I now recognise as the most mind-numbingly stupid drivel you can imagine. In fact, you don’t need to imagine. You can just switch the thing on and there it is.

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I’ve been reading about peer-to-peer marketing strategies. Although I’ve struggled to find a definition, I think that peer-to-peer marketing is about capitalising on your audience’s willingness (or rather, a segment of your audience) to market your product on your behalf. 

Methods for influencing people’s decisions have changed radically. If we can provide the tools (largely web-based) that help our audiences organise and socialise, they will influence the decisions of others, ultimately helping to build audiences at events. 

Strategies might include posting reviews or testimonials or pictures on your website from people attending your events, allowing visitors to email events information from your website to friends, through to creating quirky ‘viral advertising’ that gets posted on YouTube or other content-sharing sites or passed from one person to another via email. 

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I’ve just been reading about NaumaiPlace.com, a new website which links marae with their whanau worldwide. Launched in May, the website aims to connect marae with the 85 percent of Maori who live away from their local rohe, due to employment, education and other whanau interests.

Ten Te Arawa marae are involved in the pilot. On the website, each marae can provide their own history, video footage, noticeboards, photo galleries, taonga detail, rangitahi section and online store. (Nice to see they are using existing tools such as YouTube and Slide to host rich media, which also gets word out about the project through these networks.) NaumaiPlace.com may be extended to other marae in future.

With between 70 and 80 percent of Maori able to access the internet through work, tertiary institutions, cyber cafes or at home, I hope this is an idea whose time has come. Online communities take time to build, but the potential benefits will be the strengthening of both iwi Maori and local marae.

Here’s a video of the launch, featuring those involved and some shots of the site itself (on the website, the marae pages are only viewable if you register). If you have difficulties viewing this video in your browser, go to YouTube to view it.

Papers from the WebWise 2007: Eighth Annual Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World are available in the July issue of the peer-reviewed internet journal First Monday. The conference’s theme was ‘Stewardship in the digital age’. The papers explore how to enhance preservation and access to cultural heritage in digital form, including preserving:

• physical objects and intangible forms (language, ritual, etc) of cultural heritage
• digital surrogates used to encapsulate this heritage for access and preservation purposes
• art, music, literature, film, and other creative expressions that are ‘born digital’.

The papers report on projects and case studies in digital preservation, new tools and practices to help with preservation efforts and the challenges ahead. In her wrap-up of the conference’s themes, Diane Zorich writes:

The most overarching theme [of the conference] can be characterized by the aphorism ‘everything old is new again.’ The concepts of curation, preservation, and access discussed throughout the conference are actually age old traditions rooted in our institutions’ missions and core values. Putting the word ‘digital’ in front of these concepts means new challenges, not new changes, to our missions and values.

If this is the space you work in, this issue of First Monday will be a good read.

Nicely done - the Christchurch Art Gallery has put its audio tours on the gallery’s website. You can listen to the guides on an iPod at the gallery for $5 or download and listen to them at home for free.

The narration is by actor Sam Neill and the audio tours feature some of the Gallery’s - and New Zealand’s - most significant works of art. The website includes an image of the painting under discussion, as well as a transcript if you can’t get the technology working. 

Worth having a listen even if you can’t get to the gallery. I heard somewhere the other day that the number of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s virtual experience is greater by a third than the number of physical visitors. Virtual visits can be be relevant and measurable cultural experiences, as much as physical ones (and hopefully they sometimes initiate physical visits, too).