We now have a central site to document our installation of Dialog. There are photos, videos and descriptions of the table and it’s interface at newmedia.walkerart.org/dialog. I put the site together using the design and XSL that Brent made for the Art on Call site, I just changed the graphics and colors.
We shot a short video of two people using Dialog which I think effectively demonstrates the interface in action. The video is for a lecture Andrew Blauvelt, Walker Design Director, will give in Ann Arbor this week. It will also show up on our official documentation page which will launch this week as well.
I’ve been having some conversations recently with SFMOMA on how exactly to count the number of people that are subscribed to our podcasts. The quick answer is “look at your stats” but that doesn’t always work. For example, we run stats on our website as a whole. I can see how many page views there have been to our podcast RSS feed, but as many people know, this doesn’t tell you much.
This is because RSS readers will look for new content multiple times a day. Each request is a “view” in the eyes of the stats package, but it tells us nothing about how many unique people actually are subscribed. If we have 5000 page views on our RSS feed, is that 500 people requesting the RSS feed 10 times, or 50 people requesting it 100 times? There’s no way to know.
The answer is to generate unique stats for a filtered version of your log file. Luckly, our stats package, AWStats, allows for this. Nate was able to run a unique stats report for our New Media neighborhood, but only count stats to the URL “/aoc/rss.wac” which is our podcast feed. This allows us to see all stats on this one URL, which includes unique visitors.
Unique visitors are how many unique IP’s have accessed that URL in the given month. So if my podcast client accessed that URL 30 times, it’d still only count me as one visitor. This gives us a good indication of the number of people actively subscribed to our podcast. Those numbers are as follows:
Unique visitors to podcast RSS feed
Sep - 37
Oct - 194
Nov - 303
Dec - 524
Hey, we’re gaining subscribers! But one thing we realised was that not everyone accessing the podcast feed were using a podcast client. Some came from Firefox or IE. Most likely these people just clicked on the RSS link in the browser without knowing what it was for. They make up about 10% of the unique visits.
At the same time there are sites that aggrigate RSS feeds, where one site requests the RSS feed for their many users. Those sites would be counted as one visitor, even though many are accessing that feed. I’m not sure of any that do this for podcasts (I’m sure someone will let me know if there is), but for blogs, there are many that do (like Bloglines), making counting total subscribers for blogs much harder (just because it’s more prevalent). Thus even these numbers aren’t exact, and have the potential to skew more as time goes on and aggrigation sites become more popular, but they’re about as close as we can get for now. We’ll just have to keep on top of it.
We also decided to run another separate stat ouput on MP3 downloads. This time we limited it to MP3s downloaded from podcast clients only, too see how many audio files were actually downloaded from subscribers (as opposed to people downloading them from our website, which you can do as well). Here are the stats there:
MP3 file downloads from podcast clients
Sep - 1816
Oct - 2117
Nov - 1564
Dec - 2696
Also of note is that 86% of these files were downloaded with iTunes, which means it’s certainly the number one podcasting client out there.
Hopefully that helps others who are trying to get a handle on subscriber counts. If anyone has any insight on generating even more accurate numbers, please share!
For the second installment of this series I found two science museum blogs, one general museum resource and a podcast.
We’re trying to create exhibits and web content that offer opportunities to dig deeper into science headlines, and give you a chance to talk with each other and with scientists about your questions and concerns.
The science museum also has a Çatalhöyük Excavation Blog for their Mysteries of Çatalhöyük project. That blog doesn’t seem to be currently active (last post in August 2005) but it is still online serving as an archive of an event/time.
Science Buzz is published with Drupal and a combination of custom PHP/MySQL code.
Real science doesn’t just happen in a lab. Get first-hand information from scientists all over the planet as they send back reports from the field.
While not a blog itself the RedShift Now makes interesting use of methodologies generally associated with blogging. There is a section for short articles called Science Briefs, a regular syndication of content via RSS in the form of a podcast and an area for comments.
*support and advocate learning as a core function of museums
*cultivate best practice in museums by sharing news, ideas and experience of programs and research
Assembly… is published with WordPress
This is the first installment of a multipart series on the state of blogging in museums. I’m hoping to build on the topic started by Paul on the Off Center blog as well as preparing resources to share for an upcoming workshop. When we submitted our proposal for a workshop at Museums and the Web 2006 the Museum blogging field was sparse, well the blog landscape isn’t as small as it was a year ago. There are a lot of new blogs and blogs that are new to me that I look forward to reading and writing about in the next few weeks.
Eye Level
A blog at the Smithonian American Art Museum. I appreciate their slower paced well written updates. The blog seems to update one or two times a week with each entry being several paragraphs in length. This is not a blog about whats new and current this is publishing tool for short original articles. I grabbed two quotes from their about page.
Eye Level is a blog produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The name Eye Level imparts a sense of clarity to which the blog aspires. The name refers to the physical experience of viewing art, but it also plays on the many roles and perspectives that make a museum a reality--roles that will come into focus here.
Using the museum's collection as a touchstone, the conversation at Eye Level will be dedicated to American art and the ways in which the nation's art reflects its history and culture.
Eye Level is published using Type Pad
MuseumPro
I was really happy to find this website as it seemed to be an interesting non-affiliated site for peers to share their knowledge and backgrounds. The site is growing slowly but hopefully this initiative will grow into a useful resource. The site describes itself on the about page.
museumpro.org is the place for museum professionals to post ideas, concerns, and questions about the museum industry and our profession. Colleagues then comment on those ideas, concerns and questions in an open forum.
MuseumPro is published using WordPress
<libraryland>
Weblog by Richard Urban. This is not technically a museum blog as it deals with library information but it does provide frequent valuable information for museums and non-profit technology. A description of the blogs goals from the first post.
This is the weblog of my journery through a Masters in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
<libraryland> is published using Blogger
Chin Music Press has a partial translation of a Japanese article about publishers making text available via cell phone.
Popular writer Asa Nonami … contributed “Anata,” an original piece. For 210 yen a month, readers have unlimited access to stories. Series are updated every week from Monday through Friday. Subscribers currently number 30,000, 70% of whom are women in their late teens to 30s.
“The great thing about cellphone literature is that one can get a quick reading fix, even while standing,” said 36-year-old freelance writer Kayoko Fujino. She now has a separate cellphone just to read from. “Reading Mika Naito’s series on the train coming home from work is now an important daily routine,” she said.
Selling texts online is not a new idea but the broad market appeal and scale of success this publisher has shown is news to me. With the current state of cell phone handsets available in states this doesn’t seem like an angle for us to pursue right now but it’s sure to be a growing market when phone screens can hold larger high resolution text.
Art Calling-Digital Stories is new media artist project developed by Chiara Passa for the Medialab in Madrid. In this project a user finds a telephone number on a sticker in a phone booth. They call in and tell the program stories to be heard later by others.
People using "Art Calling-Digital Stories" only need to dial a telephone number (listed on sticker on the booth) which is linked to a switchboard (from a telephone company) with various vocal options and also various audio files…
…Inside the booth people will find another sticker with instructions about how to connect with different stories. Every tale will be told in English. The stories are about the most interesting artists, artworks and events on interactive art, software art, modified video games, demo scene, hacking tools, digital animation, video installation, sound art, from the beginning to present day, several selected by Passa herself.
A new media project where people describe other new media projects risks being overly self referential. With that said anybody in Spain might want to check it out.
We’re always on the look out for other people making interesting cell phone projects. This time I found it on Sourcecode.
CES is going on currently, and as such there’s lots of great new tech being introduced out there. One that caught my eye is a research concept by Philips called the Entertaible. It’s basically a large LCD touch screen, but supports many concurrent inputs at the same time.
They’re looking to use it for things like board games (and something like Risk would definitely be fun to play on it), but I can see it having interesting educational applications as well. Certainly if implimented correctly it could be a great alternative interface for something like the Dialog Table. From the press release:
While the concept of a multi-user digital table is not new, previous solutions have utilized complex arrangements of overhead cameras and dimmed lighting that detract from the user experience. The Philips Entertaible, however, is based on a series of infrared LEDs and photodiodes discretely mounted around the perimeter of an LCD screen. It requires no special lighting conditions or other equipment and is entirely 'hand' operated by touch alone. Entertaible can simultaneously detect dozens of objects, including fingers.
Sounds promising.
Walker Blogs received a big facelift today with the upgrade to WordPress 2.0. Of course nothing is as easy as I plan it to be, and the upgrade took longer and broke more things than I’d hoped. We’re using a clever(??) hack to keep our blog software synchronized across multiple blogs - rather than installing and maintaining unique versions of WP for each blog, I’ve got one shared installation pointing at multiple databases. WP looks at the url to determine which database to use, and from the DB gets the rest of the settings including template, etc. Works well, mostly, and it means I only have to do one upgrade and everyone gets the new version.
… it also means when something breaks, everything breaks. WP 2.0 now uses a caching mechanism which was attempting to be shared across the blogs - you’d be viewing content from one blog in another’s template, and couldn’t log in to anything after you’d been to one blog. A big mess, and a bit hard to track down at first.
Anyway, it’s all solved and working - nothing much looks different to the end user, but the writing interface got a huge upgrade so hopefully that will translate into more and better posts. Enjoy!
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