Social Good and Web 2.0

A new ride sharing service to and from New York City airports is attracting some attention for its online platform, hitchsters. I remember a couple of similar efforts have been floated the last couple of year for commuting and national ride-sharing; commuterlink and ridester. These types of Internet services, though plausible, seem to never quite get off the ground. While the community and social good from these services are clear, overall these websites never attain any critical mass and are generally pretty localized.

This seems so odd.

Web users are willing to date online, manage their banking, order groceries and books and intimate apparel, even rent movies and pay bills. Yet, somehow, we can’t quite turn the corner for sharing a ride with another person when the arrangement is facilitated online. If we are unable to build an online connection to share a vehicle, it seems fair to question whether we can build anything else more structured, impacting or longer lasting. This challenge strikes at the very root of those that see Web 2.0 as a method of fostering new communities and modes of discourse.

Amongst the positive examples cited above, the common thread seems to be connecting with a base physical experience or need. Think about how this impacts cultural institutions. In order to build powerful collaboration and community tools, it is first necessary to identify the interactions and activities that already exist and would best port to an online medium. Image tagging or social networking, while amazingly powerful activities online, do not carry a natural compliment in most peoples’ visit experience to cultural institutions.

I applaud reinvigorated effort to bring offline collaboration and social good to the web, but it remains to be seen if these can truly be successful. The execution is the key here. For the user, the benefit must be clear and the payoff immediate. As the O’Reilly Radar recently pointed out, “one of the secrets of success in Web 2.0 is to harness self-interest, not volunteerism, in a natural "architecture of participation." This will hold doubly true for commercial and cultural sites that seek to build community not only online, but offline as well.

It’s the Experience Stupid

A couple of readers replied last week with some great questions in response to my post on the graying of the web. These could be summarized as follows: if it isn’t innovation or new media that makes a good museum website, what is it? I tried to reply to this question with the examples I used in my followed-up. But, to no avail. I will spell it out…

Museum websites succeed when they offer visitors an online experience that marries the wonder of museum visitation (engaging the objects) with the opportunity for further exploration and surprising insights. Successful websites are those that create a space for experience that is not feasible in a physical museum environment.

In other words, it is the experience created that defines the success of Museum websites, not the technologies embedded or leveraged therein.

This might seem antithetical to my usual rants on Web 2.0, innovation, API’s and open access in the context of museum and cultural institutions. However, this is not the case. Web 2.0 is innovative not because its new fangled technologies, but rather because it has fundamentally shifted the paradigm of the web from eyeballs to hands. Web 2.0 and its extensions (Mash-ups, API’s, social production, tagging) have traded passive site visitorship and information broadcasting for tools that enable content creation, sharing and manipulation. This is the core innovation and it is rooted in the site visitor's experience.

Ironically, it is the experience that Museums tend to gloss over when they are wrestling with their websites. With the hype over technologies, the essential lesson is missed along with institutional mission. For example, while people certainly enjoy having access to Podcasts and tours in MP3 format, the technology itself is value-neutral. It is not the MP3 format itself that is driving people to download. The true power of the technology is in its redefining of where and how visitors interact and experience a Museum’s work.

A great analysis of the power of experience can be found in Max Lenderman’s Experiencing the Message. The author discusses the emergence of experiential marketing and what it offers brand managers in terms of both greater control and return for their efforts. And though Lenderman is primarily focused on the corporate retail and tourism sectors of the economy, the lessons are valuable for the cultural sector as well. “…reaching them might not be enough. They need to be inspired by the brand, product or service… An experiential approach – one that emphasizes a personal or sensory interaction - is proving to be the best way to reach the elusive influentials and connecors…” And while there is a real bias away from technologically-based approaches to experience in this work, his point on creating experience and not passive receptivity is important and points to the other essential benefit of experience-rich websites; the marketing and revenue return.

When experiential programming is embraced, there is a breakdown of the traditional silos of marketing/fundraising versus education/curatorial. Engaging and experience-driven websites create opportunities for loyalty, buzz and revenue where none previously existed.

The inclusion goSmithsonian on my current list of favorite Museum websites underscores this point. While it offers some surprising technologies – it is also extremely rooted in experience of the visitor. The ability to build your own itinerary (and subsequently share it with others) is a great utilization of technology to allow users to interact, build and share the experience of the Smithsonian. Its personally created and socially distributed structure reflects the web 2.0 paradigm completely. This platform, in turn, enables scheduling, reservation and other services essential to cultural tourism. (Now if only similar services like this would be developed for collections and exhibitions)

Another example, I really enjoy the public television station Channel Thirteen’s inclusion of their director’s blog on their homepage, weekly newletter and fundraising emails. One could validly ask how this is experiential. The point here is that the blog underscores the overall mission of the organization while complimenting other outreach that this institution performs - it does this by highlighting the activity, conversation and dialogue with the director.

The connective tissue here is the experience. Cultural institutions that are successful online are not just broadcasting their schedules or exhibitions to the web. These institutions are creating online spaces for exploration, conservation, sharing and connection that are rooted first in a user-centric understanding of mission.

Museums: To Flickr or Not To Flickr

The Brooklyn Museum has done a fantastic job of late leveraging some of their internal images while also enabling users' to upload and tag images of the Museum. They have leveraged the Flickr platform to give an inside look both into the creation and experience of their exhibitions - most recently the critically acclaimed Ron Mueck show. Though this feature has now been taken off the Museum's home page (it still lives on here, along with their other blogs) - the exploration into image serving and tagging provides a great insight into how Museums might serve cultural content on Web 2.0 platforms.

This is a topic worth discussing. Below is a short review of two image tagging sites. One commercial, (Flickr) the other, a joint museum research project called Steve.

Flickr

Flickr is a fully integrated platform whose primary purpose is not a folksonomy or image catalog, but the more basic storage and sharing of images amongst a diverse community of users. Social tagging is a by-product in all this. Tagging, from a functional perspective, is one of many ways in which friends and guests can comment on an image – tagging here is analogous to “comments-light” – a deprecated form of user feedback and dialogue.

What I find most intriguing about Flickr is that it points to a velvet revolution for the semantic web. The emergence of a descriptive, meta-data driven web will emerge not through killer app’s but ‘smart platforms’ that allow people to choose, create, share, comment and interact with content. Clearly, with 5.5 Million registered users and 20 Million monthly visitors - the sheer size of the network insures the platform's relevancy - but its power lies in replicating users' "natural" interactions on the web.

This is exactly the model that Museums need. Though the platform may be proprietary, the social content model leaves plenty of room for the cultural sector to define its own space and requirements.


Steve

Steve is a joint research project of technology practicioners of SFMoMA, the Met, Indianapolis Museum of Art, LACMA and Guggenheim. It is an interactive tool designed for Museum researchers, curators, technology practitioners and librarians. Steve is based on the concept of folksonomy. According to Wikipedia, a folksonomy– antithetical to taxonomy – is a labeling system created and maintained by the end-users, not a class of outside experts. In theory, a folksonomy creates more natural and user-centric search and aggregation systems.

I recently had a great discussion with a technology developer at a major art Museum regarding the life of information in peoples' actual lives. He pointed out that tagging, bookmarking and information storage is personal. With sites like Del.icio.us , part of the user's value is the
ability to choose and create networks of personally relevant resources and references - remarkably similar to the personal value of Museums. Yet, the experience of Steve is far from personal. I greatly admire the goal but the execution leaves something to be desired.

2/7/2007 UPDATE: I recently caught up with a contributor to Steve and he mentioned that the project has received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences and would soon be unveiling a site update. This is a great development and demonstrates the sheer possibility of this project. It is certainly worth following. I'll check back on Steve after that redesign has gone live with some further thoughts, perhaps even an interview (fingers-crossed).