Image: culture hot off the presses (or website server) sent directly to your website - the new content feed.

The 24 Hour Museum website has developed a free newsfeed service to spread the word about UK museums, galleries and heritage attractions even further round the world wide web.

Using XML technology widely used in the web sector, the new 24 Hour Museum service offers at least two museum and gallery stories every day. The stories come straight from the pages of the website and they are available for partner websites to link to.

Newsfeeds enable websites to reach out further with existing content to new audiences. "To begin with, we hope other museum websites and regional museum library and archive councils will be keen to get the stories. The content could just pop up as links on their homepages, and readers are filtered back to our site, where the stories are read," said Jon Pratty, Editor, 24 Hour Museum.

"It's clear the material also could have wider use - perhaps with tourist boards, arts bodies and beyond into the wider cultural and higher education sector."

Members of the public can also read the stories directly on their own computers using free 'feedreader' programs, easily available on the net.

Image: our story about the National Motorcycle Museum fire was online within a few hours of the sad event (and it beat the BBC by at least six minutes!)

What is a newsfeed anyway? "It’s an output of content from a website in a simple web language, in our case RSS 2.0, that other users, perhaps web publishers or individuals, can link to for themselves, by going to a special web address," said Jon Pratty.

Newsfeeds are sometimes used by websites which lack resources to write their own content. In many cases, these feeds are given free, because the originators of the feed have a marketing or strategic aim which it is important to publicise.

Image: our national network of volunteer writers work hard to sample the great exhibitions on every weekend all over the UK.

"At the the 24 Hour Museum we wanted to explore newsfeed technology to find a wider audience for UK museum and gallery events, exhibitions and stories," said Jon Pratty.

"Getting to the point of offering museum and gallery stories in a feed has been a big step for us, and a fantastic achievement. We've gradually worked up sufficient momentum with our coverage of museum sector activity to be able to put up content on a regular basis, in a credible journalistic fashion, with continuing support from the museum and gallery sector."

The new service has been available in pilot form on the 24 Hour Museum for a few weeks, but a structured evaluation of the mechanics of how the feed works has been carried out prior to publicising the new facility.

The feed has been offered in the first instance to www.newsnow.co.uk, a 'news agglomeration' site, to see what happens to 24 Hour Museum site usage figures.

"In fact, just from this one user of our feed, we've seen a very gratifying rise in new users to the site," said Jane Finnis, Director, 24 Hour Museum.

"An unforseen effect we've detected from our statics of user behaviour is that 'bloggers' (people making their own personal 'diary' style websites) have been discovering the feed, linking to it, and reaching even more new readers."

Professor Jonathan Bowen of London South Bank University has been crusading for new ways to link UK museum and gallery content for some time: "Online newsfeeds provide an excellent way for museums to make timely information on their websites available for linking from other news-based websites. This is an additional way to attract visitors to a museum website who may not have visited otherwise."

Jonathan presented a paper which touched on the subject of museum newsfeeds at the influential Museum and the Web conference, held in North Carolina in 2003. Click here to read Jonathan's paper in a new window.

"Jonathan's paper pointed out that the cultural sector in Britain would benefit from a dedicated museum and gallery news feed service. Now we have this facility, and it will be great to see what benefits we can all reap from this," said Jon Pratty.

Click here (opens new window) onto the excellent Museophile website to see what the 24 Hour Museum newsfeed looks like when it's not living on our site!

Jonathan Bowen's Museophile site was specially commended at the Best of the Web 2003 conference in North Carolina.

If you would like to consider linking to the newsfeed click here to contact Jon Pratty for details.