New Media Initiatives Blog

I’m very happy to announce that the Walker Design Department now has a blog. The designers have been working in stealth mode for a short while preparing posts and putting in a little content so that the site wouldn’t launch empty. In true design style, they’ve thought the format out very cleanly. Emmet lays it out in the first post:

Bulletin Board: These posts will alert you to upcoming design programming at the Walker such as the Drawn Here architecture lecture series, the Insights design lecture series, and design exhibitions like Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. And you will respond en masse resulting in many ticket sales.

Flat Files: There are boxes and boxes full of postcards, flyers, brochures, posters, gallery guides, and other Walker ephemera that we would love to properly document and archive. Since we don't have the time to do that, we'll just pull out a few pieces each month and tell you who designed them, what the project brief was, and why we love them even after all this time.

Memos: Here we will call your attention to the history of our department, how our studio operates today, and design issues that we address on a daily basis. Like fonts and stuff.

Interviews: . . . with designers. Sample question: "If you were stranded on a desert island, which 10 typefaces would you take with you?"

Junk Drawer: A catchall category for link dumps.

Additionally, many of the recent design fellows will be (and have already been) blogging:

We've invited a whole slew of former Walker designers to contribute whenever and whatever they feel like--reporting from places as far as England, Holland, and Korea, as well as places more close to home like MCAD. We want to hear what they're working on now, what is interesting to them, who they think is stroking it, seriously downloading the uploader. Who knows what they'll write about. Not we.

There are already ten posts in the blog, so interested readers will have some insightful catching up to do. Here’s the URL: http://blogs.walkerart.org/design.

Ars Technica reported today on some startling statistics regarding blogging from the workplace:

Nearly four in 10 bloggers (39 percent) with a job have written something sensitive or damaging about their workplaces, employers, or coworkers, according to UK human resources firm Croner. The company commissioned a survey that asked 2,000 people whether or not they have a blog, and if so, how many of them have posted sensitive information about work. And despite the seemingly constant stream of warnings saying otherwise, some employees still seem to think that no one will discover their blog transgressions--which could eventually get them fired.

The numbers seem a little higher than I would expect, but perhaps I am not too familiar with the feeling of working for a monolithic corporation. There are two things I take away from this. First, we have a different situation here within the Walker and within the larger museum web. We already have blog guidelines for our own blogs. Many of our employees that are bloggers on their own are also bloggers here and are familiar with our guidelines, which are not onerous. Secondly, unlike a corporation which may depend on secrecy to keep it’s advantage, we in museums and non-profits aren’t so worried about that. We like to share and let people know what we’re doing.

And as an aside, the Powerhouse Museum recently adopted a new blogging policy that draws upon some elements from ours. Share the love.

After our workshop and listening to Seb and Jim I came home with a Must-Do list of changes for our blogs. During the research on these changes I stumbled across a recent post by Tom Johnson on his blog “I’d Rather Be Writing”: Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog -- Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers' Experiences. This is incredibly good information that every blogger — and especially museum bloggers — should take to heart. And then I found this post - also a great read. In fact, I just spent about 20 minutes on his site: I think everyone should go read and subscribe to his blog right now. :)

Seb Chan, Jim Spadaccini

One of the most anticipated sessions of the conference for me — and more than a few others, judging by the size of the crowd!

Refreshingly, they start by saying they won’t just rehash the paper since it’s available online. Rather they’ve continues to check the blogosphere and will report on recent developments and other insights not in the paper.

Tracking the number of blogs shows essentially exponential growth after a slow start: as far as Jim can tell the first museum blog was infoTECmuseo, Quebec, Canada, started on 6.06.2002! They summarized some findings from the paper, with Seb mentioning how the bottom-up approach for starting a blog has been a theme. Just as the Walker blogs started under the radar with the NMI blog, PowerHouse’s Fresh+New started as an internal blog and later went public.

[ Interesting case study: Zeke’s Gallery - tries to have 3 posts before 10am. Uses Google Alerts to seed him with art news every morning. This model requires much less time than purely original content. ]

They included a well-done slide on “recommendations” for those about to blog or already blogging - the biggest one we’re missing is the format of our permalinks. It’s been on our list for ages, time to do it. The remaining points were all good tips for increasing searchability and keeping momentum rolling on the blog. One final bullet point recommended linking to other museum blogs. The NMI team has been debating this internally for a while, and I think we’ve decided to do it in a two-pronged approach: a blog-wide linkroll, and an author-specific blogroll that would show on their profile page. This will hopefully give us the resolution we need without cluttering the site.

Discussion!

First question had to do with that very issue - how to ethically cross-link without just throwing up an OPML file with no filtering. Jim addressed it by explaining how museumblogs.org vets inclusion into their site and recommending museums use a similar process of deciding who to link to.

A question about comment-friendly posts had Seb trying to explain how hard it is to predict - often comment solicitations are ignored. He basically summed it up by saying if you know your audience you may be able to prod them with an on-topic post that ends up generating discussion. In our workshop we essentially recommended people not ask for comments - nothing looks worse three months later than a request for comments followed by … nothing.

Seb mentioned he thinks the library sector is probably about 2 years ahead of the museum blogosphere - they already Radically Trust their users in ways museums are still learning. Jim also brought up political blogs such as Daily Kos and Huffington Post as being well on the front of the trend. The volume is so big they have to self-curate on Kos.

Bryan Kennedy piped up and said in addition to trusting users we need to trust time - it takes time and involvement to build a successful blog. Older posts can re-appear and become popular down the road. Seb followed up by pointing out F+N’s plugin that automatically pulls “related posts” - again, something we should do.

Kevin from RedShift Now cautioned that the care and feeding of a blog actually takes significant time and effort, and a committed team is important. A woman from the Antarctic project I linked to from the workshop mentioned that images in the posts were key, especially if they’re taken just for the post.

Donovan brilliantly tied in BF Skinner’s schedules of reinforcement - that our readers are the rats pushing the bar to get the positive feedback (our posts). Of course, isn’t random reinforcement the most effective? We’re there!

Robin gave a hat tip to the NMI team and emphasized trusting the staff with the blogs, especially the more junior staff who may be less intimidated by blogging.
Seb summarized: do it. Start a blog. It should be free, easy, and fun, so go start experimenting.

The entire New Media Initiatives department of the Walker is currently in San Francisco attending MW07. Nate, Justin, and Brent lead a workshop this morning on Museums and Blogging, and it seemed generally well-received. Our notes are online at the New Media wiki site, please feel free to surf around and explore there - especially pay close attention to the Strategies section, unfortunately we were running short on time and a lot of Justin’s fantastic research didn’t get the time it needed.

We’ll try to keep blogging the conference as we attend various sessions and meet more people, so far it seems to be even bigger than last year…

Let’s see, it’s Friday morning… haven’t posted in forever… must be time for WebWalker!

• The Quartet Project is built on the very cool idea of mixing multiple inputs - sound, movement, motion capture - into multiple outputs: virtual instruments, and even a projected virtual dancer. The cast of Quartet comprises of a dancer, a musician, a motion controlled robotic camera, and a 3D virtual dancer. It looks like a lot of custom development for this, tied together with MAX/MSP. The Project Outline section has more details on the performance.
• You won’t generally find these opensource advocates linking to Microsoft, but this is actually a cool project and they’ve got an API so you can plug into it for your own site. Asirra is an alternative to the widely-used CAPTCHAs involving wavy and distorted text that PETA’s blog described as being “torture devices for dyslexics“. MSR calls Asirra a “HIP” (Human Interactive Proof) and it involves quickly classifying pictures of pets as either dogs or cats - so easy a child could do it, but difficult for computers without some serious processing. Just another tool in the constant arms race against the spam bots…
• WordPress continues to make my life better: the team has just released (finally!) a central repository for plugins. What used to be a rather complicated process - “1. I know there must be a plugin for this… 2. What was that site again? 3. Man, how can I be sure this is the latest version? Who’s the original author? 4. Cross fingers and download.” - is now reduced to “1. Go get it from WordPress plugins.” Sweet.

If you’ve visited the blogs lately you might have seen a few small changes around here. There have been a few under the hood too. Here’s a quick list in case anyone is interested:

• We’ve made comments more prominent on individual blogs as well as on the blog home page. We wanted to increase the visibility of comments in order to foster more of a community feel. People do comment and you should too.
• Nate also re-enabled the subscribe to comments plugin. If you make a comment and want to get further responses by email, it is for you. And we have a general comments feed as well as comment feeds for each blog. Again, this change is aimed at fostering more dialogue on the blogs.
• Nate performed an upgrade to Wordpress 2.1, which made life a lot easier for us, thanks to the dual mode visual/code editor.
• We’re now using Viper’s Video Quicktags to let our authors post youtube video without having to deal with embed tags and what wordpress does to them.
• The ECP blog has received some customization for two categories: Girls in the Director’s Chair and Respond to Kara Walker. I was able to modify the template in such a way that the design changes can be implemented with css. Posts to these categories get a different design treatment, and the category pages themselves also get a different design treatment.
• For the Respond to Kara Walker category, we also wanted to let people post their responses to the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, in much the same way that the postcards and response book in the gallery allow visitors do. We figured the best way to do this was to let people simply create their own post. And thankfully the TDO Mini Form plugin lets us allow people to create a post without having to log in.
• We also began using another plugin, Better Feed, to modify our feeds to add some meta info and a link to our survey in order to promote it to our readers.
• Finally we put out our first-ever blog survey to try and understand more who our readers are and what they’re coming for. Initial results have been encouraging and give us some ideas for things we might want to work on. The survey is still open, so please take it if you haven’t yet. We’ll be discussing it during our upcoming workshop and posting some of analysis here after that.

We have made some small, though useful, changes to the blogs in the past few weeks and we think they’re worth a small note.

• Brent added the blog title to the blog aggregator page. Now it is much easier to tell what content goes to what blog. Additionally, post titles link to the blog post and the blog name to the front page for that blog.

• We’ve added the ability to display info about our blog authors. Authors are now listed in the sidebar in each blog. When you click our name you’ll be able to see our email address, personal or departmental URL, and a bio, if the author has elected to post one. Not all of our authors have updated their profile yet, but eventually you should be able to learn more about just who we are. Some of our authors have also elected to post photos.

  Eric posted about some of Jakob Nielsen’s weblog usabilty tips discussing author bios and photos. I agree with Eric that author photos are certainly not necessary, and we’re not requiring them for our authors. Those of us that are brave enough are breaking the ice and have posted photos. Please be kind. It just happened to work out that Party People Photos gives us some recent, high quality photography.

• Last week Paul posted the first in what we hope will be a more frequent audio blog series. We’re using the wordpress plugin WP-SingleMP3 to embed a nifty flash audio preview in the blog post, but also linking the mp3 audio so the category RSS feed can function as a working podcast.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the experience and information on the blog. If you have any ideas or constructive criticism you’d like to share, we’re listening.

Often in our posts we’ll include links to upcoming or current events at the Walker, but those events rarely if ever include links back to the blogs. We’ve always intended to go back into the events and add related links to the blog posts to help foster discussion, but it’s just one of those things that kept slipping off the radar.

Until now! I just finished writing an XML RPC ping server for Walker content and have set WordPress up to ping it every time we post. The ping server pulls the RSS feed and looks for links back to the Walker site, and then does some magic to add a related link from that page back to the blog post. If all goes well we’ll start to see more traffic between the calendar and the blogs and vice versa, and best of all it will happen automatically whenever we post about an event.

CultureGrrl gives Art on Call a try and writes a review on her blog. I’m not sure when she actually used the service, but we’ve just recently installed a nifty cellphone signal repeater in the space deepest in the galleries that previously got terrible reception - right next to the Burnet gallery. It’s possible her carrier simply doesn’t benefit from the frequencies we’re repeating (it doesn’t cover them all) but I’m hopeful it was just a matter of timing and the repeater hadn’t kicked on.

As for her other comments, I think some of them will be addressed in the near(ish) future as we start incorporating feedback into the menu prompts. For instance, many people don’t realize you can interrupt the initial prompt by typing in the 4-digit code, effectively skipping right to the artwork you’re looking at. Hopefully that will take some of the hassle out of repeated calls if you can just hit redial, wait for the answer, and then just punch in the code. Much faster.

Anyone else lurking on the blogs have an experience with Art on Call (web or phone) they’d like to share? Leave a comment or link back to this post and we’ll pick it up.

We’ve often discussed how much we should be posting behind the scenes of the Walker Blogs. I’m sure most people writing a blog or reading a blog have opinions about that. Darren Rowes has a post about this very topic where he raises several valid points on his own and quotes an equally relevant post by Seth Godin.

So how do you balance growing an audience through frequent posts against retaining people by avoiding reader fatigue? An article previously mentioned suggested publishing at regular frequencies, a strategy we’ve tried on our Visual Arts blog with some success. That is certainly a good for bloggers to get in the habit of writing but with more people using RSS it certainly seems less important for readers.

Sources:Beth’s Blog

We’ve decided to give Akismet a new test: trackbacks. Walker blogs have been trackback-free since the launch, and this was generally considered to not be a loss since we were too new to generate many inbound links.

Today, however, a quick tour through the list of linking blogs proves otherwise: there are worthwhile posts out there talking about us! (awww) In fact, the whole reason I’m posting this here is so I can link to this post about the channel (and link to the original post in the ECP blog). In the future that will all happen automatically with this change.

Hopefully everything will go according to plan, but believe me I’ve got my finger on the trigger over here - any spam gets through, any lame posts about nothing and BAM, no more trackbacks…

In the meantime, read something you like here? Something you hate? Post about it on your blog with a link back to the original, and you’ll show up in the trackback list.

There were some good suggestions about Weblog Usability on Nielson’s site, posted October 2005. Some suggestions about writing style that are general purpose suggestions for the web, but I also mention this because the Walker Blogs missed his first and second points.

1. No Author Biographies
Unless you’re a business blog, you probably don’t need a full-fledged “about us” section the way a corporate site does. That said, the basic rationale for “about us” translates directly into the need for an “about me” page on a weblog: users want to know who they’re dealing with.

It’s a simple matter of trust. Anonymous writings have less credence than something that’s signed. And, unless a person’s extraordinarily famous, it’s not enough to simply say that Joe Blogger writes the content. Readers want to know more about Joe. Does he have any credentials or experience in the field he’s commenting on? (Even if you don’t have formal credentials, readers will trust you more if you’re honest about that fact, set forth your informal experience, and explain the reason for your enthusiasm.)

2. No Author Photo
Even weblogs that provide author bios often omit the author photo. A photo is important for two reasons:

• It offers a more personable impression of the author. You enhance your credibility by the simple fact that you’re not trying to hide. Also, users relate more easily to somebody they’ve seen.
• It connects the virtual and physical worlds….

Nielson’s point is certainly interesting, sharing an author’s credentials on a blog makes perfect sense but I had never seriously considered having author images (they remind me of the Wrox covers which I’ve never seen as flattering). I certainly wouldn’t have put it at #2 on my list of usability errors, ahead more serious problems like #5 Classic Hits are Buried which is a mistake I realize we have also (partially) made. On the plus side point #8 about Mixing Topics supports our rational for splitting the Walker Blogs up into 6 different sites.

If you publish on many different topics, you’re less likely to attract a loyal audience of high-value users. Busy people might visit a blog to read an entry about a topic that interests them. They’re unlikely to return, however, if their target topic appears only sporadically among a massive range of postings on other topics.

Just a few more things to think about when starting/fixing/maintaining a blogging initiative.

We’ve been thinking about how to make the audience comment experience better on our blogs lately. The first step was to allow any person to subscribe for email alerts on a per post basis. So when any person comments on a post you’re interested in, you get an alert to let you know. Simple enough, but we hope it will allow people to follow conversations better. We are using a Wordpress plugin called Subscribe to Comments 2.0 by Mark Jaquith.

If your out there reading this and frustrated by your commenting experience let us know. We are actively working to make things easier.

I did some looking into blog carnivals after hearing a talk by Daniel Mosquin from the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden about engaging different communities with them. From reading on blogcarnival.com I found this:

A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.

To me that sounds like a topic based aggregation service but it’s not in real time, which makes it distinctly less blog-like and, as they mention in that quote, and more resembling an online magazine. Bora Zivkovic compares a blog carnival to a professional science journal on his own blog, he also maintains a list of active carnivals called the meta-carnival. This seems similar to Eyebeam’s ReBlog project, which also rotates through editors (guest bloggers). It might also be compared to smaller scale of Global Voices, which aggregates multiple blogs. The slower pace of carnivals may theoretically attract more thoroughly researched papers and grow an audience not interested in blogging because they see the fast pace of most blogs as frantic. In practice however neither of those conjectures are true about the blog carnivals I’ve seen.

We briefly discussed a museum centric blog carnival with Jim from Ideum while we were at the conference. I’m not sure if a carnival, or an aggregator or reBlogging is the best idea, but it’s certainly something we are interested in hearing ideas about.