Archive for the ‘Social media’ Category

Last night the programme for the 37th Wellington Film Festival was launched at the Paramount in Wellington. It’s always a packed event and the hottest ticket in town is the ’still warm from the press’ festival brochure. This year the brochure has a brand-spanking new format. It’s big, it’s glossy and it’s bulging with celluloid treats. The website has also been spruced up and it’s fabulous and informative - check it out at www.nzff.co.nz. And in a smart move the festival is making the most of our obsession with Web 2.0 and have their very own MySpace page where you can see snippets of some of the films on offer.

The 2008 Festival line-up is chock-a-block with good Kiwi talent and includes the largest number ever of feature-length New Zealand films. Well done, we say! Fourteen diverse works from the South to North Island represent the New Zealand of today in all its vibrant shades: idiosyncratic, traditional, outrageous, conformist, gritty, ephemeral.

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by Terry Makewell, National Museums Online Learning Project (Victoria & Albert Museum)

One of the main linchpins for the new Web 2.0 world is user generated content. As I mentioned in a previous post this is moving away from the read only web to a read/write web environment where the user really becomes part of the experience. They are no longer just a passive viewer of the content. They are adding to it and even creating if from scratch.

Within the museum sector many different websites have been created with the aim of getting the user to participate. There are numerous degrees to the model of participation. These range from users commenting, tagging or taking part in forums through to the sole creation of content on websites through bespoke methods or blogs.

One thing that is always difficult, if not impossible, to estimate is the size of user uptake. The ‘if we build it they will come’ mentality has been consigned to the pages of web history. When building a site that calls for user participation it is important to understand what are the star features that will get your users in and using it. The trouble is that it is often very hard to know what these are. The audience is constantly changing and evolving and what they want and what they have come to expect is constantly changing and evolving. Each new website raises the bar slightly higher.

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by Terry Makewell, National Museums Online Learning Project (Victoria & Albert Museum)

From beaches across the world to cultural learning organisations.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is currently undertaking the World Beach Project (www.vam.ac.uk/worldbeach) in collaboration with artist Sue Lawty. This is a global art project open to anybody in the world and the idea is for people to build on the experiences from holiday of making patterns on beaches and shorelines with numerous different objects. This site is a good example of how cultural organisations can use the elements of web 2.0 to bring in and engage their users through participation in both activities and via mash-ups. 

The idea has been borne from Sue Lawty’s blog on the V&A website. A particularly good post on this blog concerns a family from the UK who relocated to New Zealand for a few years and undertook a family version of some of her beach artwork. This is detailed in the blog post New Zealand Stones.

Bruce Bay - Stones on driftwood

Ensuring that this type of website is integrated into your working practices is important when thinking about sustainability. Ways in which this can be made possible have been investigated by Eva Moraga. She has undertaken the discussion of how cultural organisations need to define new organisational models in order to respond to the constant transformation entailed by new media and Web 2.0.

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Check out this graph from an article on eMarketer about ‘The rising roar of word-of-mouth’. More and more, people are influenced by friends, family and also strangers over other promotional channels when they make decisions about what to buy and where to go. Click on the image to see a larger version of the graph. It means we can’t underestimate the value of promoting our services and activities using testimonials, reviews and commentary from our audiences.

Rules can be handy. Here’s a quick read from the BBC - their fifteen web principles. I like the fact that they remind us that it’s not just all about me and my website, but about taking and giving, linking and feeding, across the web.

Finally, a link to Alan Brown’s article on Fuel4Arts outlining his framework for the value of the arts. It’s a great piece of work - I won’t attempt to summarise it here - read the article instead, or cast your eye over the short summary on Creative New Zealand’s website (where you can also listen to a webcast with Alan). At a seminar in Wellington last month, Alan directed his arguments to both marketers and arts managers, arguing that his framework provides a common language for explaining the benefits and values of our programmes to our audiences and to our sponsors. He strikes a great balance between reminding us that the number one reason people attend arts events is to relax and have fun (and that we should design our programmes to be more relevant to these people’s needs and this social context) with his obvious belief in the value of the art itself:

Being completely absorbed in an arts activity is at the root of everything and without it, you can’t reap the other benefits.

I’m adding this post rather tentatively in response to a video that I’ve just seen at a seminar on the future of e-government by Mike Pearson from the State Services Commission. The video was created in 2004 by the Museum of Media History. It charts the history and future of media through to 2014. You can view it here (it’s eight minutes long and thought provoking).

In the year 2014, the video predicts that internet users will be provided with news stories customised to their individual needs and interests. Thanks to the information we’ve provided to search engines and social networking sites, data about our personal social networks, demographics, interests and consumer habits are used by the likes of Google and Microsoft to filter the information and messages that we receive.

The widespread availability of tools for preparing and publishing content online has made it easier than ever before to create and consume media. As users everywhere create their own news and access the news of their trusted networks, The Fourth Estate goes into freefall - no longer having sole authority over the news or the ability to regulate news channels.

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