New Media Initiatives Blog

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.

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.

Christmas has come and gone, but this post is still going to be Christmas related, unlike some blogs that have self-imposed moratoriums on such posts. My Mother always told me Christmas is a season, not a day, so I feel within respectable guidelines posting these things.

• Pentagram redesigns Christmas. Pretty interesting idea, and the results are a mix of intrigue, ah-ha and ha-ha (but no hint of ho ho ho). See also: The New York Times reports, or listen to Michael Bierut with Kurt Andersen on WYNC’s Studio 360.
• Everyone in my family elf’d themselves (yes, that is me). It truly seems that user generated content has hit the mainstream when this kind of site is a smash hit.
• If you’re not reading the Adobe blogs, you should be. John Nack posted about The Secret Life of Smart Filters yesterday, which is an interesting read. I’m always interested in the history and inside workings of Photoshop. Arguably, Photoshop is one of the most indispensable and influential tools used in the process of creating new media work.
• Time Magazine’s Person of the Year (hint: it’s you) has generated some controversy in the blogosphere. Whether or not you think it was a good choice, you should read the last page of the magazine. Andy Was Right:
  

  But YouTube is Pop art in a form far closer to Warhol’s original, uncorrupted vision than he could ever have imagined. And 15 minutes has been replaced by a new prophecy: “On the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people.” Appropriately enough, many people share authorship of that one.

We’ll be back in 2007.

A little over a week ago Walker staff moved from the temporary offices at One Groveland. We’re now mostly settled into our new spaces above the galleries. I took a few quick, unofficial shots of the new space and created a new office photoset on the Walker’s Flickr page. You may note that just a few month’s ago this was Robin’s office, but it has been transformed.

My general read on the new offices are that people are very glad to work in the museum again, because we take great pride in working for a cultural institution. It is much easier to feel that pride if you’re actually in the building.

We in New Media are very happy to be in closer proximity to the Dialog Table and Hennepin Signage servers. The trip has been reduced from a walk down the block to a walk around the corner. The break room is also popular due to increased fridge size, large windows, and abundance of coffee.

I’ve uploaded everything to flickr and put it in our group. Don’t forget to join our group and add your photos to the pool once you’ve joined the group!

[Now that our main blogger is leaving, we’ve got to start picking up the slack and posting. I promise eventually to not just post about hardware and software bugs, but today that’s what I’ve got…]

Porter continues to be a rockstar hardware-wise, but I’ve been having some trouble with the proxy/caching webserver running on it. Sure, it’s caching, but every so often it would grab a version of page and decide to keep it for 3 days instead of the directed 1 hour. At first I thought it was a one-time deal from switching some cache settings on the server, but it kept happening… Walker staff would make a change to some content, wait, but it would never show up on the live page. Trouble.

The problem was caused by a line stored in the cached HTTP header: Cache-Control: max-age=259200. (that’s three days worth of seconds) (I’m including details so google can pick this up and hopefully save some poor guy a frustrating morning.) After some serious digging it appears the mod_cache module we’re using was taking whatever Cache-Control header was being sent by the browser and saving it in the cached header! In other words, I had configured the server to cache things for a maximum of 1 hour, but all it took to blow that up was a browser (or spider?) sending a request saying it didn’t want anything older than 3 days. Our caching server held on to that “3-days” part and decided the whole page should be valid for that long. Totally. Wrong.

I debated making changes to the mod_cache source and recompiling, but I finally found an easier answer: “CacheIgnoreHeaders Cache-Control". This tells the caching module to ignore the problem lines, and it seems to be golden. I’ll let it run for a while and see…

[In further bad news, the US got creamed 3-0 by the Czech Republic in their World Cup opener. Not unexpected, but it doesn’t bode well for getting past group play…]

Watching last night's broadcast of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, my ears perked up on a segment about the impact of the iPod. Since its introduction in 2001, Apple's iPod has been transforming the landscape of technology and culture. From a must-have among snowboarders at the recent Olympics to new cars that come iPod-ready, the report suggested that people are as interested in what the iPod says about who they are as the opportunities the technology gives them to control their environment.

What some scholars refer to as the "podification" of society--now there's a word I hadn't added to my vocabulary--was reported as just the latest chapter in a continuing story of technology and culture. From the remote control, VCR, to Sony Walkman, the personalization of technology allows us to exercise almost complete control over our environment and contributes to what Christine Rosen calls "egocasting," the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one's personal taste.

So, what does it mean if we're all walking around with iPod buds stuffed in our ears? Isolated, "alone together," propagating the "hear only what we want to hear" mentality would be the downside. The more positive outlook recognizes a democratizing impulse encouraged by the technology, and educational opportunities at all levels of the spectrum that provide students with potential audiences to whom they feel accountable.

Suppose I have a server with two different perl 5.8 installations in two differen paths (necessary for a variety of legacy reasons) and now have to rebuild an old mod_perl Apache to compile in a module. But whenever I go to rebuild it, it picks the wrong installation of perl to build against, and hence the wrong @INC, and hence nothing works when I try to launch Apache. Anyone know where this can possibly be set? I don’t see any options in Makefile.PL that can say “hey, use this perl installation”, and it seems like this must happen to other people — so what’s the answer?
(no, the original Apache was compiled without mod_so, so I can’t just load the module dynamically. Grr.)

Finally caught up enough after MW06 to post the recent flurry of videos to the Walker Channel: check out Tiravanija & Sterling (artist talk), and Mevis & van Deursen (part of INSIGHTS). We’ve got even more coming up, Chipp Kidd on the 25th, and then on April 3rd Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne discuss the Whitney Biennial. Busy, busy!

Just a little over a year ago the Walker launched its first blog - this one! It was soon followed by several departmental blogs and the behind the scenes grab-bag known as “Off Center”… In this first year we’ve seen our blogs grow from an unsure project (”Let’s just start blogging and see what happens! Who wants to write?”) to a pretty important part of the Walker’s web presence (”Hmm, maybe we need to draft some guidelines for these blogs…”). It’s been a fun road from my side: WordPress was hacked once because I was late with an upgrade, we lost some posts and had to scramble with the backups to recover them, and the battle with comment spam is ongoing (but we think we’re winning finally).

I think two people deserve an extra shout-out for their incredible impact on bringing this project to where it is today: Eric, for his design work, incredible WordPress wizardry, patience in teaching staff how to blog, and actually posting when the rest of New Media just talks about it, and Paul, for his total commitment to the blogs, great (frequent!) posts, and for raising the bar on what we want them to be.

Here’s to one year down, many more to go!

In our constant effort to bring the best and bravest blog experience to our loyal readers, I’ve just finished upgrading the Walker blogs to WP 2.0.1. Those WordPress kids have been keeping busy! As always, let us know (leave a comment) if there’s anything that looks funky.

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!

Friend and colleague Scott Sayre has been passing along some interesting reading of late, including this article on "Social Machines" by Wade Roush. Roush posits that technologies like blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and web access from our phones are "ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing--continuous in the usual sense of "uninterrupted," but also in the sense that it's continuous with our lives." His discussion of the social-software boom and it's reliance on common devices such as mobile phones, computers, digital cameras, and portable music players echoes an approach or emphasis characteristic of several of Walker's new media initiatives.