New Media Initiatives

If you’re visiting town and are out and about, getting info on the Walker and other cultural institutions in the city via the web just got easier. Minneapolis’ city-wide wireless network now lets users access walkerart.org without being a subscriber. Here’s how it works:

On your computer, select the “City of Minneapolis Public WiFi” network.

Open your browser and point yourself to walkerart.org. That should do it. You may be directed to a user agreement log in screen and then the “walled garden” of Minneapolis city information and lists of other accessible community sites. The Walker is listed under Area Arts & Culture > Arts & Museums > Art Museums.

Wireless Log In Screen

Minneapolis Dowtown Area Walled Garden Portal

A brief history of Minneapolis Municipal WiFi

Several years ago, the City of Minneapolis joined with USI Wireless to build out a city-wide network. The goal was to provide access for city government and citizens. The city would be a core tenant, paying USI, and USI would sell access to citizens. The city required USI to build a community portal and USI must provide grants out of it’s profits to non-profits working to bridge the digital divide.

Over the last several years, the network has slowly been built out. Right now there are some problem areas, which include Loring Park and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. My understanding is that these areas should see service sometime soon, though I’m not sure of any exact plans on the Sculpture Garden.

There are a couple things I have really liked about the network:

• We’re doing it. A lot of cities have talked about building municipal wifi, and then discover large problems and things don’t work well. There have been some issues with in Minneapolis, it is taking longer to build the network than originally thought, but my impression is that it has worked fairly well.
• It’s network neutral. The agreement between the city and USI specifically requires USI to not hinder any type of traffic over another.
• Parts of it are free. This is how you can get to our site for free.
• It’s low cost. The cost for being a subscriber is pretty low, compared to other wire-based providers.
• It’s local. USI is a local company.

For more information on the network and the history, Peter Fleck has been blogging about Minneapolis WiFi for some time.

One of the trending topics on Twitter currently is “IE6 Must Die“, which are mainly retweets to a blog post entitled “IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On“. This is certainly true, IE6 has many rendering bugs and lacks support for so many things that it is simply a nightmare to work with. The amount of time and money wasted in supporting this browser across the web is staggering.

In fact a few months ago the New Media department decided to drop support for IE6 on all future websites we create. The last website we built with full IE6 support was the new ArtsConnectEd, mainly because teachers tend to have little say in what browsers they can use on school computers. However, moving forward we’re phasing out support for IE6. It simply costs us too much time and resources for the dwindling number of users it has on our sites (currently under 10%, which is down 45% from last year and falling fast). We’re not alone, many other sites are doing this as well.

However calling for the killing of IE6 ignores a bit of history as well as new problems to come. There was a time not so long ago when all web developers wanted to be using IE6. The goal back then was to kill off IE5. You see, IE5 had an incorrect box model. Padding and margins were included in a boxes width and height instead of adding to it like in standards compliant browsers.

This caused all sorts of layout errors, and meant hacks (like the Simplified Box Model Hack) had to be used to get content to align correctly. These hacks were so widely used that Apple was going to allow them to be used in the first version of Safari until I convinced Dave Hyatt (lead Safari dev) to take out support for it. IE6 fixed this bug and everyone was happy (for a while anyway).

Going back further, IE5, even with its broken box model, was at one time the browser of choice back when IE4 was killing Javascript programmers because it didn’t support document.getElementById(). IE4 only supported the proprietary document.all leading to a horrible fracturing of Javascript, whereas IE5 added in the JS standard we still use today. Before people embraced IE5, cross platform JS on the web was almost non-existent, a fact I attempted to rectify by building my Assembler site in 1999.

The reason I bring this up is because we have a history of this behavior with regards to IE. We yearn for the more modern versions, only to end up hating those same versions later on. This will not change with the death of IE6. Soon, it will be IE7 that we are trashing, and then IE8 will be the bane of our existence.

This only becomes more clear as we move to HTML5. IE8 doesn’t support it, nor does it support any CSS3. While IE8 does support many of the older standards it had been ignoring for so long, having just recently been released it is already out of date. All of the other browsers do support these advanced web technologies, but IE is the lone browser to ignore them. Once again IE is two steps behind where the web is going, and severely limits our ability to push web technology forward to everyone for many years to come.

So while we celebrate the death of IE6, let us not forget that there will be a new thorn in our side to take its place in short order. IE7, you’re next.

It’s a little known fact that I put myself through college spinning cotton candy during the summer months. This project using live climate data and hacked cotton candy machines made me smile:

Climate Hack at Transmediale Festival
“Climate Hack is a workshop for emerging researchers, designers and artists dedicated to reframing the international political climate using means well-outside the traditional political rhetoric. Using both old and new technologies, live internet data streams and a diverse collection of hacking skills, workshop participants will produce a series of projects for public exhibition during the finals days of the Transmediale festival in Berlin, Germany.

Driven by the often-absurd nature of politics and the collective creativity often generated from equally absurd artistic mediums, the workshop will rally around the task of hacking Cotton Candy machines. Custom and hacked electronics, connected to live political news and weather feeds, will inform and animate the project. The result will be a set of dynamic and playful art objects designed to invert our perception of “everyday politics”.”

I’ve just made a minor tweak to My Yard Our Message. You can now download the full resolution jpeg file for each sign as well as embed the signs into another page or blog, just like I am doing here.

All the signs for My Yard Our Message must be licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike License to be submitted to the project, so we are obligated to make the files available to all. They always were, but not easily accessible. Now we’ve got a link right there under each sign for the file.

For the embed, I’m using an iframe which is certainly the easiest method to getting a nicely formatted widget on the page, because it avoids any CSS inheritance problems that a Javascript and document.write solution might have. The downside is that it is not always compatible with every blogging or HTML authoring solution out there, due to the way some have a tendency to filter HTML. Regardless, it is good enough to satisfy most user’s needs.

University of Minnesota professor Ali Momeni and his students are on their way to San Jose’s Zero1 Festival later this week with their mobile projection units. The mobile projection units are GRL-inspired work bikes equipped with a computer, projector, generator and all other necessary gear for outdoor projection mayhem, which will be used during The UnConvention. The group has set up a new blog, Minneapolis Art on Wheels, to document the exploits of the trip. They’ve loaded up the bikes into a cargo van and are caravanning across the western United States.

Before he left, Momeni told me he was curious to see if they could project onto the face of Mt. Rushmore. I’m not sure if they’ll pull it off, but the latest updates from the Badlands are pretty close; pure projection geek porn.

I’m heading out to Zero1 later this week and will be blogging about the festival and hope to meet up with Momeni and his students for some fun in San Jose.

June is the end of our fiscal year, a time when everyone responsible for compiling statistics completes those all-important spreadsheets demonstrating program success (or so it is hoped). The report card on the Walker websites was a good one. This graph reflects the combined user sessions of the three domains managed by new media: walkerart.org, mnartists.org, and artsconnected.org (a collaboration with The Minneapolis Institute of Arts). In FY05-06, we had 6.3 million visitors, and in the year ending last month 8.7 million, an almost 40% increase.

The four main metrics we report are page views, unique visitors, user sessions, and user hours. We emphasize users sessions, believing they are the best comparison to the Center’s attendance numbers, while recognizing that all web statistics are subject to inherent caveats. For more on importance of using multiple metrics, see Brent’s recent post.

Here’s the breakdown on the Walker numbers by domain:

On walkerart.org, we’re especially interested in where visitors are spending their time. Traditionally, the Walker calendar, Gallery 9, and the home page have been the most popular sections. Last year, Walker blogs entered the top tier and continue to rise, outpacing the calendar in September of 2006, the home page in January 2007, and Gallery 9 in February 2007. The Walker blogs have remained on top ever since and are without question, the most visited section of the Walker site.

I came across this story online about how Nielsen/NetRatings is going to drop its normal website rankings that use page views as a metric, and change to user session length instead. Much of this has to do with the advent of AJAX, with content loading on the same “page” and thus not being counted in the page views statistic Nielsen/NetRatings currently uses.

Forget how this impacts the current online leaders (the article says it will hurt Google, and in the same breath says it will help YouTube, go figure), I just found it interesting that they were still using page views as their main metric. While we certainly keep track of them here, we tend to put much more weight into user sessions. Take for example this comparison of page views vs. user sessions on our website, from Feb. ‘07:

tickets.walkerart.org

Page Views: 347,258

User Sessions: 2,581

blogs.walkerart.org

Page Views: 305,609

User Sessions: 105,387

Notice the difference? Our tickets website had more page views than our blogs did, but only 2% of the user sessions. Why? Well, it’s mainly because there are many more pages in our ticketing system to go through to place an order, as well as a few iframes here and there that just inflates the page count. By itself, one would think looking at the page views that tickets was the more popular site, but in reality many more people visit our blogs.

Like any statistic it’s important to look at multiple sets of data to come to a conclusion. With these two metrics we can not only find the depth of our visitors but also the breadth. Blog users don’t seem to dig as much, perhaps because they don’t have to compared to what’s required in a ticketing system checkout process, or perhaps because they haven’t found anything interesting to read and leave!

This is where Nielsen has made their change. Instead of just looking at simple page numbers (which is important to advertisers to count “impressions” of ads), they’re now wanting to see how long someone has spent on a website. This means the trend has changed from the number of impressions, to the overall impression length.

We also keep track of user session length on our websites. And again when combined with the other metrics, it adds another layer of info we can use to determine the relative success and weakness of our sites. Here are the user session lengths of the above sites for the same time period, in seconds:

tickets.walkerart.org

Session Length (secs): 589

blogs.walkerart.org

Session Length (secs): 281

Probably what you would expect. It took a lot longer for those users on tickets to weed through all those pages to place their order. However if you look at the ratio of users to page views for each site, and then look at the session length, you’ll notice that blog readers spend more time on each page during their sessions.

tickets.walkerart.org

Ave. Secs./Page: 4.4

blogs.walkerart.org

Ave. Secs./Page: 96.9

Obviously the tickets time is a bit skewed, because of iframes, robots and the like, but this shows that people do spend much more time on average on each page on our blog website than on tickets, even though the overall session length on blogs is less. This is good, it means people are getting through the ticketing software quickly, even with all the pages to load, and it also means people are actually staying on our blogs and (hopefully) reading.

Session length can also show us popular sites we may have otherwise missed. Take our Walker Channel from the same period:

channel.walkerart.org

Page Views: 21,596

User Sessions: 6,732

Session Length (secs): 574

Ave Secs/Page: 179

The user sessions on our channel aren’t super high, at least not in comparison to some of our other sites, and neither are the page views. However, the session length, and more importantly, the number of secs users spent per page is very high. Those people who do visit the Walker Channel like to spend a lot of time there. Perhaps this is something we should put more time into, to drive more users to this content? In fact, that’s exactly what we are starting to work on.

Interactive Architecture has a lengthy article on Marek Walczak’s recent work

The article touches on the Podium Light Wall made for 7 World Trade Center and the Shimmer Wall, a video wall that represents sunlight shimmering off the Hudson River for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Don’t miss the Dialog Table which makes an appearance at the end of the article.

Interactive Architecture has a lengthy article on Marek Walczak’s recent work

The article touches on the Podium Light Wall made for 7 World Trade Center and the Shimmer Wall, a video wall that represents sunlight shimmering off the Hudson River for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Don’t miss the Dialog Table which makes an appearance at the end of the article.

The Walker blogs are among some of the more well regarded in the museum world, and we’re always working on making them better. With that in mind, we present to you a survey. It consists of 11 quick questions that will help us understand why you read our blogs. Your identity is totally anonymous. Down the road, we will be sharing some follow-up analysis on the new media blog.

The full survey is below, in this post, but if you have problems you can visit our dedicated survey page. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or browser without javascript support, our survey should work, as it does not require javascript.