Social Media Statistics

One of those totally brilliant and obvious-in-hindsight ideas. I'd like to see stronger guidelines on citing sources as it grows and clear differentiation by region/nation, because it's easy for vague figures and rumour to become universal 'fact', but it's a great idea and will hopefully grow: Social Media Statistics is:

A big home for all facts and figures around social media – because I'm fed up of trawling around for them and I'm also sure that I'm not the only one who gets asked 'how many users does Facebook have?' every hour of every day. … I'm hoping that this wiki will not only include usage stats, but also behaviour and attitude stats. It's a bit of a skeleton at the moment, with v few of my stats having stated sources, but be patient – and help where you can!

Please add in any juicy stats as you come across them, and do cite your references and link to them where possible.

I'll put my money where my mouth is and add information I find. I find wikis a really useful tool for lightweight documentation – it's really easy to add some information while it's in your brain, and the software doesn't get in the way of your flow.

For a while now I've wanted a repository of museum and cultural heritage audience evaluation – this could be a good model. Speaking of which, I really must write up my notes from the MCG Autumn meeting.

[Edit to add: Social Media Statistics also links to Measurementcamp, which might be of interest to cultural heritage organisations wondering how they can 'measure their social media communications online and offline' (and how they can work with project sponsors and funders to define suitable metrics for an APId, social media world).]

UK Museums Computer Group – call for committee members (and annual meeting)

With all the potential for interesting collaborative projects in the sector at the moment, it's a great time to help the Museums Computer Group (MCG) work with those working in, funding, managing and generally interested in digital cultural heritage.

From Ross Parry's email to the MCG list:

Would you like to be part of taking the MCG forward and shaping its round of events and initiatives across the country – including its two annual meetings, its 'UK Museums on the Web' conference, its research, its website, and its publications?

With its 'MCG@25' consultation process coming to a close this is an exciting time to join the committee and help define its role and activity for the years ahead.

This autumn the MCG will be electing several new members of its committee, including a new chair, meetings organiser and two new 'ordinary members'. If you would like to find out more about this professional development opportunity and how to stand for election to the committee then please contact either the MCG Secretary, John Williams (mcgmembers2006@btinternet.com) or acting Chair, Ross Parry (rdp5@le.ac.uk).

Full disclosure: I joined the MCG Committee last year and am co-webmaster with the excellent Mike Ellis. I was nervous – who knew if they'd think I'd fit? but I'm very glad I braved it as it's a rewarding and interesting role. I think it also fits with something that's close to a personal motto – Mahatma Gandhi (apparently) said: "Be the change you want to see in the world".

WCAG 2.0 is coming!

That'd be the 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0' – a 'wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible' with success criteria 'written as testable statements that are not technology-specific' (i.e. possibly including JavaScript or Flash as well as HTML and CSS, but the criteria are still sorted into A, AA and AAA).

Putting that in context, a blog post on webstandards.org, 'WCAG 2 and mobileOK Basic Tests specs are proposed recommendations', says:

It's possible that WCAG 2 could be the new accessibility standard by Christmas. What does that mean for you? The answer: it depends. If your approach to accessibility has been one of guidelines and ticking against checkpoints, you'll need some reworking your test plans as the priorities, checkpoints and surrounding structures have changed from WCAG 1. But if your site was developed with an eye to real accessibility for real people rather than as a compliance issue, you should find that there is little difference.

How to Meet WCAG 2.0 (currently a draft) provides a 'customizable quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 requirements (success criteria) and techniques', and there are useful guidelines on Accessible Forms using WCAG 2.0, with practical advice on e.g., associating labels with form inputs. More resources are listed at WCAG 2.0 resources.

I'm impressed with the range and quality of documentation – they are working hard to make it easy to produce accessible sites.

Global, not institutional, repositories FTW

In Some (more) thoughts on repositories, Andy Powell writes about academic repositories of research publications, but I think it's applicable to the cultural heritage sector too. Particularly when he writes on 'fit with the web':

Concentration
Global discipline-based repositories are more successful at attracting content than institutional repositories. … This is no surprise. It's exactly what I'd expect to see. Successful services on the Web tend to be globally concentrated (as that term is defined by Lorcan Dempsey) because social networks tend not to follow regional or organisational boundaries any more.

Web architecture
Take three guiding documents – the Web Architecture itself, REST, and the principles of linked data. Apply liberally to the content you have at hand – repository content in our case. Sit back and relax.

Resource discovery
On the Web, the discovery of textual material is based on full-text indexing and link analysis. In repositories, it is based on metadata and pre-Web forms of citation. One approach works, the other doesn't. (Hint: I no longer believe in metadata as it is currently used in repositories).

The museum sector has already created cross-institutional repositories (broadly defined, I don't care if it's a federated search or a big central pot of content), but are they understood and championed well enough? Are they maintained and integrated into on-going content creation and editing processes? Are their audiences encouraged to personalise and re-use the content?

Sadly also still relevant:

Across the board we are seeing a growing emphasis on the individual, on user-centricity and on personalisation (in its widest sense). … Yet in the repository space we still tend to focus most on institutional wants and needs. I've characterised this in the past in terms of us needing to acknowledge and play to the real-world social networks adopted by researchers. As long as our emphasis remains on the institution we are unlikely to bring much change to individual research practice.

Lots of people working in digital cultural heritage get it – but they're not necessarily the ones at the decision-making levels, and they're not necessarily in on projects from the start to help make the project design user-centred and the content (technically and semantically) interoperable.

FTW, by the way, stands for 'For The Win', defined by Wikipedia as 'Of something which completes a process in a successful manner'.

Urban spam, coming soon to a space near you

In the post 'design engaged the second', Russell Davies discusses 'urban spam' (my emphasis in bold):

The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist.

…in recent years the declining efficacy of regular 'broadcast advertising' has created the largely horrible ambient and guerilla media industries – a huge marketing arms race aiming to squeeze every drop of attention from unwilling eyeballs.

I think we object to this so much for a number of reasons:

a. Because it doesn't feel like a societally negotiated deal. We're basically OK with the notion of ads in newspapers on in the middle of Coronation Street. That's a deal we've done. We'll swap that much attention for that much subsidised media. But every new bit of spam forces us to examine that deal again; is it worth doing? Are we willing to swap this bit of attention for that bit of fun or utility or free stuff?

b. The deal isn't that clear. What do I get out of Coffee Republic selling space on their tables? Is their coffee noticeably cheaper or better? Are the staff better paid and more cheerful? What do I get out of the way you've brokered my attention?

Particularly b. What do I, the customer, get in return for the slice of my soul you're stealing?

And further:

4. We need to stop describing ad-supported things as 'free'. There might be no exchange of cash but there's an exchange of attention and cognition. The marketing business justifies a lot of crap on the basis that it's giving things away for free. If we paused and recognised that they're not actually free then we might think harder about whether it's the right thing to do. We might do smarter, better things if we recognise the cost we're imposing on people without their permission.

Go read the whole thing, the pictures are also very useful and it summarises lots of the things that have been bothering me about the ads that are popping up in any spare space.

So why am I posting this here? Partly because the commercialisation of previously ad-free space annoys me, but partly I think it's a discussion worth having while the field is relatively new and norms are being erm, normalised.

Finding problems for QR tags to solve

QR tags (square or 2D barcodes that can hold up to 4,296 characters) are famously 'big in Japan'. Outside of Japan they've often seemed a solution in search of a problem, but we're getting closer to recognising the situations where they could be useful.

There's a great idea in this blog post, Video Print:

By placing something like a QR code in the margin text at the point you want the reader to watch the video, you can provide an easy way of grabbing the video URL, and let the reader use a device that's likely to be at hand to view the video with…

I would use this a lot myself – my laptop usually lives on my desk, but that's not where I tend to read print media, so in the past I've ripped URLs out of articles or taken a photo on my phone to remind myself to look at them later, but I never get around to it. But since I always have my phone with me I'd happily snap a QR code (the Nokia barcode software is usually hidden a few menus down, but it's worth digging out because it works incredibly well and makes a cool noise when it snaps onto a tag) and use the home wifi connection to view a video or an extended text online.

As a 'call to action' a QR tag may work better than a printed URL because it saves typing in a URL on a mobile keyboard.

QR tags would also work well as physical world hyperlinks, providing a visible sign that information about a particular location is available online or as a short piece of text encoded in the QR tag. They could work as well for a guerrilla campaign to make contested or forgotten histories visible again – stickers are easy to produce and can be replaced if they weather – as for official projects to take cultural heritage content outside the walls of the museum.

The Powerhouse Museum have also experimented with QR tags, creating special offer vouchers.

Here's the obligatory sample QR – if your phone has a barcode reader you should get the URL of this blog*:

qrcode

* which is totally not optimised for mobile reading as the main pages tend to be quite long but it works ok over wifi broadband.

[Update – I just came across this post about Barcode wikipedia that suggests: "People would be able to access the info by entering/scanning the barcode number. The kind of information that would be stored against the product would be things like reviews, manufacturing conditions, news stories about the product/manufacturer, farm subsidies paid to the manufacturer etc." I'm a bit (ok, a lot) of a hippie and check product labels before I buy – I love this idea because it's like a version of the ethical shopping guide small enough to fit inside my wap phone.]

[Update 2 – more discussion of a 'what are QR codes good for' ilk over at http://blog.paulwalk.net/2008/10/24/quite-resourceful/]

BCS: Is It Time For Copyright 2.0?

The British Computer Society (BCS) asks, Is It Time For Copyright 2.0?

The piece summarises and links to Lawrence Lessig's WSJ article, In Defense of Piracy and says:

In the meantime, I think the best way forward may also benefit from the idea that, in a global digital content economy, (where content flows easily across national boundaries), we should seek to implement and embrace a global framework for copyright, in order to lessen the reliance on national systems that far too often add undue complexity to the notionally simple concept of Intellectual Property. This is, in many ways, similar to Prime Minister, Gordon Brown's call for an overhaul of the global financial regulatory system that would better serve the needs of a global financial economy. Perhaps the copyright system should also take heed before it suffers a similar fate.

Nice summary of web 2.0 for the digital humanities

It's an old post (2006, gasp!) but the points Web 2.0 and the Digital Humanities raises are still just as relevant in the digital cultural heritage sector today:

In summary:

  • Give users tools to visualise and network their own data. And make it easy.
  • Harness the self-interest of your users – "help the user with their own research interests as a first priority".
  • Have an API -"You don’t know what you’ve got until you give it away", "Sharing data in a machine readable and retrievable format, is the most important feature. It lets other people build features for you"
  • Embrace the chaos of knowledge – "a bottom-up method of knowledge representation can be more powerful and more accurate than traditional top-down methods".

Art is everywhere

Described as 'a project of awareness to stimulate the imagination through "art"',
Art is everywhere finds some interesting pieces, including empty art frames on city walls that make the wall underneath appear as possible art, and invisible monuments. I like their statement, 'To seek for the beautiful in the daily things it undoubtedly helps us to… live better'.

UKOLN's one-stop shop 'Cultural Heritage' site

I've been a bad blogger lately (though I do have some good excuses*), so make up for it here's an interesting new resource from UKOLN – their Cultural Heritage site provides a single point of access to 'a variety of resources on a range of issues of particular relevance to the cultural heritage sector'.

Topics currently include 'collection description, digital preservation, metadata, social networking services, supporting the user experience and Web 2.0'. Usefully, the site includes IntroBytes – short briefing documents aimed at supporting use of networked technologies and services in the cultural heritage sector and an Events listing. Most sections seem to have RSS feeds, so you can subscribe and get updates when new content or events are added.

* Excuses include: (offline) holidays, Virgin broadband being idiots, changing jobs (I moved from the Museum of London to an entirely front-end role at the Science Museum) and I've also just started a part-time MSc in Human-Centred Systems at City University's School of Informatics.