New Media Initiatives

Jennifer Trant and David Bearman know how to stage a good conference. Museums and the Web 2009 continued the tradition of inspiring a community of museum professionals to do more, stay connected, and advocate principles of openness, sharing, and participation within and among our institutions. In no particular order, here are some of my takeaways:

Gotta do a game
I’d read about but didn’t understand SAAM’s “Ghosts of a Chance” until now. Can’t say that we’ll do an ARG but Georgina Goodlander’s enthusiasm is infectious and the programming that’s happening as a result of goac is something to emulate. Group activities, family and school programs, sms combined with looking at art = serious time spent at museums, fun, and engagement. “Fancy a cuppa?” Read her paper and play a sample game by sending the text message ‘goac black’ to 95495.

I never liked evaluation until there was WolfQuest
WolfQuest is a 3D wildlife simulation game developed by Eduweb and the Minnesota Zoo. Dave Schaller and Kate Haley Goldman reported on the evaluation, incomplete but three-fourths baked. The great thing about this evaluation is the sheer volume of data, no statistically insignificant results here. This is one of those rare instances where follow-up interviews with surveyed users reveals whether they actually did what they said they would as a result playing the game (e.g., lookup info about wolves on the Internet, make art related to wolves, visit a zoo). An unfortunate truth is we only do evaluation where funding requires it, and we rarely get the information needed to truly inform new versions or future initiatives. This project proves otherwise.

The conference that Twitter made
Twitter was the talk and technology of the conference. MW2009 was among Twitter’s top 10 trending topics, even claiming #1 on Friday.  I will admit to not liking the Twitterfall on screen during the opening plenary—too much of a distraction—BUT the conference vibe and distillation of what people were thinking, feeling, seeing as evidenced on Twitter was amazing. Reading the topic feed provided entry into sessions that I hadn’t been able to attend and helped me select must-read papers for the flight home.

IMA puts Indy on the map
From Max Anderson’s opening keynote “Moving from Virtual to Visceral” and the generous sharing of information about cloud computing and ArtBabble to the Friday night reception and chance to wander the gardens and galleries, the Indianapolis Museum of Art set a high bar for local hosts. IMA is reason enough to come back to Indy (that and the Children’s Museum which I didn’t get to). Also, must say I loved the airport:  small, clean, pretty with all the amenities (ample Starbucks, free WiFi) and I could check-in with an electronic boarding pass on my phone.

Winning is nice
The Walker’s My Yard Our Message won best of the web in the innovation category. For a team that’s been feeling like it lost the “new” in media during the long ArtsConnectEd development effort, this was nice. But the big winner was Brooklyn, who took top honors for exhibition (Click! A-Crowd Curated Exhibition), on-line community or service (Brooklyn Museum Collection, Posse, and Tag! You are It!), and best overall site (brooklynmuseum.org). Sadly, the award coincided with the museum’s announcement of cost-saving measures in response to economic challenges. Among these actions, a moratorium on staff travel, which meant no one from Brooklyn attended the conference. Instead they sent a video acceptance speech thanking their director, team members + dogs, and above all the audience and participants that made it all possible. I was nearly in tears.

Resolution
Having been referred to as a “seasoned webster” in the conference Twitter stream, I resolve to stop expressing the feeling of being old. I have yet to figure out the reward for colleagues catching me in the act of “old” behavior but there will be one. Really, I’m not that old, I’ve just been in the game for more years than most M&W participants and … okay, I’m exhibiting old/been there behavior.

Nina Simon
Nina’s mantra—translate those digital experiences into the physical space of the museums—is something we’re trying to do at Walker in the upcoming reinstallation of the collection. She started her mini-workshop with the British comedy sketch “Facebook in Reality” (a must watch if you haven’t already http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs) and then showed examples from Harrah’s gift card to the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book return/tagging exchange as examples of integrating technology into the visitor experience. Seemingly simple, great examples (read Nina’s paper), but oh so hard to do (as in coming up with the good idea). I’m still wrestling with her closing observations about the disconnect between IMA’s online and physical presence but her ideas are nonetheless aspirational.

Going home
We got great feedback on ArtsConnectEd, just what we needed going into the May 4th public soft launch. We developed the content submission technology—collection records exported in CDWA Lite XML format and harvested with OAI-PMH—to support the future possibility of including other collections but weren’t prepared for the number of people asking how they could get their stuff into the repository. It all holds great promise but there are a few politics to work out on our end.

Charlie Moad (developer at IMA) kicks off the session with a discussion of cloud computing, the advantages and disadvantages.  One of his most compelling arguments in a non-technical sense is the incredible energy efficiency of these large data centers: their cooling system and power use are at levels we can’t approach in our co-located server rack. Google is approaching a 1.1:1 ratio of cooling to power consumption. They’ve recently documented their cooling and datacenter practices here.

Other advantages Charlie mentioned for using Cloud computing:

• Scalability
• Pay as you go. This is the big benefit. You use what you need when you need it, also helping the efficency.
• No hardware to administer. No downtime. This makes sysadmins very happy.

Some disadvantages are:

• Security. (Not sure on this… don’t recall amazon or google having any big issues with security. This is in the hands of us doing their jobs and setting proper permissions.)
• Portability. AWS and Google App Engine (GAE) are proprietary systems. GAE has more issues in this realm than AWS.

One other thing to note about Google App Engine that Charlie didn’t mention is that GAE is a spec, and from what I’ve heard from various python people, Google very much wants it to be implemented by others. There is already an open source implementation of AppEngine called AppScale. And Joyent has an implementation called ReasonablySmart.

IMA is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting ArtBabble. A simple breakdown of their usage thus:

• EC2 instances for transcoding video
• S3 and CloudFront for storing video and media files (images/js/etc)
• Wowza streaming server running on EC2 for streaming video

Cloud computing structure for ArtBabble

Charlie had a nice slide I don’t remember being in the paper: a diagram of where these services sit in the cloud (storage vs service) and what the end user’s browser is actually talking to at any time. It sounds like changing the number of wowza instances is still a manual process, but I imagine it could be automated.

The stats are impressive: 40,000 video views since launch 9 days ago, and 3,500 registered users.  They’re cleverly using Google / Yahoo sign-ins to create OpenID accounts, without telling people it involves OpenId.  Uptake is much higher by hiding the technology on this process…  Also impressive is the cost, or lack thereof: they’re able to run ArtBabble for the same cost as their internal website.

Charlie closes by mentioning a few recent advances in Amazon’s hosting that allows essentially pre-paying for a year’s service at a much discounted rate.

I think I’m not the only webmaster in the audience who is thinking “we have to move our sites into the cloud,” but also concerned about finding the time to do so.  This paper and presentation have gone a long way towards answering some questions I haven’t been able to research fully.

Jusitn Heideman also contributed to this post.

For the past month or two, we have been working on changes to mnartists.org. We deployed some of these changes several weeks ago, and just deployed even more now. I thought I would take some time to highlight the enhancements and new goodies.

Homepage

The first change you’ll notice when visiting the site is that the home page got an overhaul. The rotators for New Artwork and Featured Collections were changed to display images to the full-size of their boxes and they animate smoother. This means sometimes cropping work, but we think it’s a trade-off worth making.

Articles are also displayed with a three-tier hierarchy, allowing the site to call recent writing out more prominently, even though we feature six instead of 10. The sidebar on the homepage has also been reorganized, bringing the mnartists.org blog to the top and adding links to the Facebook and Twitter profiles for mnartists.org.

The revised homepage.

Revised article page

Articles

Articles got some attention in several ways. First, we changed the way images are displayed by adding a larger expanding gallery at the top of each article, rather than having small images thumbnails listed down the left side. On the back end for editors, we also added an enhanced editor (tiny mce) to allow for richer control over formatting and even embedding other media.

Social media Sharing
Across many areas of the site, you’ll now see a link to Share this article/artwork/collection/event. Using much of the same code we developed for the Walker Calendar, sharing is now easier on mnartists.org. We connect with Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Delicious, Google Bookmarks, and Yahoo Bookmarks, as well as rolling in email links in a few places.

The new sharing links.

Search

The one change that will probably make everyone cry tears of joy is the search results refinement. We’ve heard lots of complaints about the search, not wholly unfounded. The search actually works pretty good, but the simple search weights everything more or less equally. If you search for someone’s name, hoping to just get their artist page, it will be in the results, but there might be other things that rank higher.

The revised search result page lets you change your simple search into an advanced search, using tabs above the results to select the type of resource you want to search for. This is very similar to what google does with their search results refinements (web, images, video, maps, etc.).

Old style search results

New search results with refinements.

Artist Pages

Artist pages also got an overhaul with two big changes. First, images for each artwork will display at a new, larger size, about 519px tall and/or 520px wide. For artworks with more than one image associated, a gallery rotating gallery will cycle through the images. Previously, if an artwork had more than one image associated, only the first would show up, and the rest would be listed in the “Related Media” list.

Old artist homepage.

Revised artist page.

Secondly, we changed the way Related Media works. Now, it is simply “Media List” lists every type of media associated with an artwork. More importantly, for non-image media, such as video and audio, we embed the media in the actual page. So if you upload a quicktime file, the quicktime embed code will be generated and put right into the page. MP3 audio files will be played with the jwplayer flash player, making audio on the site a lot more nifty. We’re using the excellent jquery.media plugin to do this.

This approach to handling media isn’t without some issues, but given the variety of media already on the site and our resources to work on it, this is the best solution. We are looking at making more substantial changes to this in the future, but this is a good incremental improvement.

Artwork with video before changes.

Artwork with video after changes. (Two video files attached)

The image size and media enhancements have also been applied to the collections area of the site.

Editing text

Another change we made a month ago was adding a visual editor to various form fields on the site. Prior to the change, users could only enter a very limited selection of markup to entries, [b] for bold, [i] for italic, and [a] for a link. We’ve eliminated that and replaced it with the new editor (tiny_mce), which allows for bold, italic, underline, unordered lists, and links. While seemingly simple, it was actually quite a challenge to deal with both the legacy code and the new formatting. The text actually goes through several transformations between the editor, the database, and being displayed again. Keeping everything consistent is a non-trivial pile of regular expressions.

The new visual editor.

One thing that we will have to keep an eye on is users pasting in text from Microsoft Word. Word tends to shove a bunch of garbage pseudo-html into the clipboard, and when pasting, it can be difficult to filter out. The editor has a button to Paste from word (with the blue W) that helps.

Any issues?

If you notice any problems with the site, please let our community manager or myself know. Bugs may crop up, and we do fix things.

We just made a small addition to the Walker website: a social media page. In case you didn’t know, the Walker is on Flickr, Twitter, FaceBook, and YouTube. The Walker has actually been in those spaces for some time, but there hasn’t been a good connection from the Walker site.

There are four different Walker-related groups for user contributed content on flickr: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker After Hours, and WACTAC. The social media page highlights the most recent Walker and Garden photos. We also post a good number of photos of our own, from After Hours to exhibition installation views. To make things clearer, we also added a official photography policy.

Since around September of 2008, I have been posting on twitter as the @walkerartcenter. Twitterfeed fills in some gaps with our blog posts, but I try to announce other notable things and answer visitor questions there. When the #snowmageddon happened, our twitter followers knew about it first. The social media page lists our latest 5 tweets to give visitors a good indication of what we tweet about.

We’re on the Facebook, too, and keep the page up-to-date with selected events and current exhibitions. Facebook doesn’t let Pages do a whole lot, but we’ve got 6500 fans.

And the Walker’s YouTube page has been around for over a year, first starting with the Tell us a story about your suburb project for Worlds Away. We’ve posted a few things from the archives there, and we’re slowly porting content from the Walker Channel to YouTube as well.

Setting the social media page up was made easier by using the Tweet! and jQuery.Flickr plugins.

If you’ve tuned into the live streaming events the Walker Channel has carried in the past, you have been forced to use Real Player to watch. Real was great back in the day when the Walker Channel was launched, but in 2009 it is a little dated. Flash streaming is much more convenient, and the VP6 codec flash offers is quite good. 

For tonight’s The Art of the Book panel discussion, we will be using ustream.tv to stream the event, rather than Real Player. No fancy plugins or separate applications required. It is also free, and doesn’t require us to run our own Real Media server. It will also help us decrease the turn-around on getting a recorded event into the Walker Channel, iTunes U and YouTube. None of this is rocket surgery, of course. Other places, like The UpTake, have been using free straming services very effectively, we’re just a little late getting on the bandwagon. 

We’re doing tonight’s lecture is a test of ustream, and we will be working out any kinks. We’ve done some testing already, but haven’t used it in a live setting where anyone other than a handful of people have been watching. 

If you’re watching and run into any problems, let us know. Shoot me an e-mail (click on my name to get the address), hit us on twitter, post here, or join the chatroom on ustream.

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”.”

Last week we made a small change to our online calendar, adding social media sharing features. This means it is easier for readers of our online calendar to tell their friends and contacts about events. In our calendar, if you click the “share this” button, it slides out this drawer:

There are a number of pre-made DHTML widgets out there that are easy to use, but don’t provide quite the user experience we would like to have. Furthermore, they don’t share the content as cleanly and aren’t event specific. So we made our own functionality. It isn’t rocket surgery, but some notes on what we did may prove useful for others.

Sharing to calendars
Because this is an online calendar, sharing events to other calendars are very important. We already have an iCal feed for our calendar, and it is already set up to share specific events rather than all events, we just hadn’t been using that feature. The new sharing widget does so, simply by passing the proper event ID to our iCal page. A user can download this .ics file and it should work in Outlook, Sunbird, or iCal.

We also added sharing to google calendar. Google has an event publisher guide that documents how to share events to gCal. Compared to most other sharing solutions, gCal is more complicated. The main thing we had trouble with was formatting the date properly. Google prefers the date in what it calls “UTC format”, but I cannot find documentation anywhere showing what google uses is actually UTC format. What UTC format actually appears to be is the ISO 8601 time formatted without any punctuation. This is very similar to what the iCal format uses internally. Thankfully, since we were already calculating this for the iCal format, Nate was able to easily pass me this info for each event. With that, it is simply a matter of putting together the various components of the URL:

gcalURL = 'http://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&text='+encodeURIComponent(share_eventTitle);
gcalURL += '&dates='+startDate+"/"+endDate;
gcalURL += "&sprop=website:"+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&sprop=name:Walker%20Art%20Center";
gcalURL += "&details="+encodeURIComponent(share_eventDesc);
gcalURL += "&trp=true"
if (theLocation){
	gcalURL += "&location="+encodeURIComponent(theLocation);
}
window.open(gcalURL);
return false;

Sharing to social media sites
MySpace and Facebook both have specifications for how to share events to each of them, documented here and here, respectively. For Facebook, it is important to modify your page to include the meta tags it requests. When you share to Facebook, it doesn’t pass a description or image via the URL. Rather, Facebook scrapes the referred page to ascertain the description and images. Using the Meta tags gives much better results than whatever Facebook’s scraper comes up with. Most of the time, if you rely on their scraper, it will come up with some chrome images from your site rather than actual content images.

MySpace doesn’t scrape the page like facebook, so it’s important to construct a friendly description, with an image, if you can. We put a linked image along with the first few sentences of text for the description we pass to MySpace. Here is the format MySpace uses:

http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=postto&u=YOURURL&t=YOURTITLE&c=YOURDESCRIPTION&l=3


We also “share” to twitter. There isn’t really sharing per se, on twitter, but you can pre-assemble a tweet for someone. Simply pass someone to http://twitter.com/home/?status=YOURTWEET. We assmble the event title, a reply to our twitter account, and a twitter-friendly shortened URL. Like this: “2008 British Television Advertising Awards @walkerartcenter – http://bit.ly/3c60xK”.

To get the friendly URL, we’re using bit.ly, one of the many URL shortening services available. However, bit.ly has a handy, well documented, API that does JSONP, allowing us to get around cross-site scripting issues.

Sharing to bookmarking sites
Sharing to Bookmarking sites like delicious (formerly del.icio.us, we miss the old URL) is quite simple. These are the formats for Delicious, Google Bookmarks and Yahoo Bookmarks, respectively:

http://delicious.com/save?jump=yes&url=YOURURL&title=YOURTITLE
http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk=YOURURL&title=YOURTITLE
http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/toolbar/savebm?u=YOURURL&t=YOURTITLE&opener=bm&ei=UTF-8

Yahoo Bookmarks like to be opened in a pop-up window, but it isn’t strictly necessary. Always remember to urlencode text that is being passed into the URL, since there are many reserved characters in the URL. Javascript provides the encodeURIComponent function to do this.

When we switched from standalone WordPress to WordPress MU for the Walker Blogs, we also switched from Spam Karma 2 to Defensio. Spam Karma 2 had its funky interface issues on the admin, but it worked really well keeping our comment spam at bay. 

We’ve been using Defensio for not quite two months, which should be plenty of time to train the filters, but our statistics aren’t that great:

Recent accuracy: 97.10%:

• 3708 spam
• 147 legitimate comments
• 135 false negatives (undetected spam)
• 12 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)

I’ve never had great confidence in Akismet, but perhaps my misgivings are unfounded. Are there any other spam comment plug-ins people like? What have been your experiences?

What I’d really love to see is a comment plugin that used an Akismit-like baysein filter for catching the big stuff, than Amazon Mechanical Turk to test the stuff it’s not sure about. I’d pay $0.10 a comment for that.

It had been a slow build, but an incident a few weeks ago made it finally clear: the Walker website was becoming a victim of its own success.  A post on the Teens site contained a picture of the Joker for the then-upcoming Batman movie, and as Halloween approached we found ourselves on the front page of Google image search as people began looking for costume ideas.  The exponential traffic was crippling our web server:

The biggest problem was simply that Apache is heavy.  It’s resource-intensive, especially when you are running several modules as we were – PHP, proxy, cache, etc.  The teens site is especially difficult since it runs as a combination of a blog (PHP on Apache 2) and .wac pages (mod_perl & Axkit).  Every hit to the Joker post – even if the page was cached – would tie up a number of Apache processes as it served the style sheets, images, and javascript to support the page.  We were reaching our MaxClients setting but unable to raise it without running out of memory for our other more intensive servers (mod_perl and postgres, I’m looking at you…).

As this diagram shows, it’s nothing but Apache servers, and it just wasn’t scaling to meet our current demand.

The approach was two-fold: some quick auditing and re-writing of the worst offending .wac pages’ SQL to speed up the slow pages, and yet another web server in front of everything.  It was a no brainer to pick Lighttpd, or “Lighty”.  It’s written to do one thing – serve static content – and do it extremely fast.  Fortunately it can also proxy requests, so it was a pretty simple matter to reassign some ports and write a few rules to route all requests through Lighty.

The end result is astonishing.  Our server hums along happily under even the most intense traffic we can throw at it (the email blast for the British Television Advertising Awards) and doesn’t even start to complain.  Moving the bulk of the requests to the extremely fast and resource-light server meant we could devote more resources to quickly processing the slow pages (mod_perl).  Between the SQL tuning and the extra resources, the bulk of these pages are now served between 2 and 10(!!!) times faster!

The lesson here, for anyone with an Apache server creaking and groaning under increased traffic, is to stop waiting and install Lighty.  If your site is PHP-based, you can run this as a fast CGI module from Lighty and do away with Apache altogether.  You can also use Lighty to stream (and “scrub”!) flv and mp4 video files.  (I’m using both of these techniques for the new ArtsConnectEd.)

The only caveat: be careful as you look for examples on the web.  Remarkably, it seems there are many confused webmasters who expect to see a performance boost by putting Lighty behind their struggling Apache.  This will not help at all, and in fact will probably make things worse.  Lighty has to be first in the chain to take the load off Apache.

Enjoy the speed!  I know our server is enjoying the breathing room!

Thanks to everyone who took our Blogs survey over the past couple of weeks. We received a good amount of feedback that we’re in the process of digesting. We also picked a winner for the iPod shuffle, who happens to be a new media developer as well. I hope to post a little more info about that soon.

I thought I would share some of the statistics and comments from the survey, in case anyone is interested.

My hunch is that the kind of people who take our survey are those that are already somewhat interested in programs that the Walker offers, and are likely to want to closely follow what we do. The responses to the first question seems to back up that assumption:

How did you find the Walker blogs?

The number of people who came here from a search engine is significantly lower than what we see looking at our analytics, but not all search engine referred visits are of the same quality as people who come on their own. Also, if you’ve been a blog subscriber for years, do you really remember how you found the blog in the first place? Probably not.

We asked how often people read the blogs. The answer is pretty often, with a good chunk of people using RSS readers:

How often do you read the Walker blogs?

And the reasons people read the blogs:

For what reasons do you read the Walker blogs?

How many people have left a comment:

Have you ever left a comment on the Walker blogs?

Where people live surprised me a little bit:

Where do you live?

St. Paul seems under-represented, as do the suburbs (which are caught up in the jumble of text in the graph). We did focus the choices for this question on the United States, but we do know that there is an international readership.

We also asked people what other blogs they read, which gave us a ton of responses. Here are the handful that were mentioned the most:

• Design Observer
• Boing Boing
• Manystuff
• Modern Art Notes
• Brooklyn Museum
• FFFFound!
• We Make Money Not Art

And some of the more eclectic (or just mentioned less):

• Magic Made Simple
• Switchblade Comb
• Because I Said So
• The Acme Siren
• Grain Edit
• Mediation

I liked this question a lot, because it gives a sense of what our visitors are reading and what their interests are. The list is heavily weighted towards museum/art blogs and design related blogs. I also liked the question because it gives me a few more sites to add to my RSS reader. Thanks survey takers!

Finally, we asked for some general feedback and comments from anyone who wanted to share. Here are several:

The Walker blogs are great. I really like hearing from designers at Dwell, a magazine I also read, right on the Walker’s site. I love that dialogue w/ outside designers and artists that’s brought to me via the Walker because of the staff’s professional networks that extend well beyond my own! Keep it up :)

I enjoy reading your blogs but I really feel that they could use more pictures,video and audio

It would be nice to have guest bloggers on every topic, or to have less specific, umbrella blogs covering a not-so-wide range of topics and points of view.

Be less Minnesotan.

(I’m not sure what that means, eh?)

I live in Massachusetts and can’t come to the Walker very often, but I love your blogs because they keep me connected… and they make me want to move to Minneapolis.

I think NMI should blog more

Here’s trying.