As the new year grips us with icy claws it’s time to look back on another year of audience growth and achievements with content and partnerships at the 24 Hour Museum.
2006 has been a year of new challenges. Once again we’ve beaten ambitious audience targets (5 million unique users came to the site making a total of 10 million visitor sessions) but the web world marches on, with developers and entrepreneurs continually dreaming new ideas and new widgets. And readers and web users are savvy too – 2006 has been the year of YouTube and MySpace, Club Penguin and Flickr, all adopted by creative users as well as less ambitious netters.
From where I sit (in our new office in Brighton) it often seems web users are making more creative and adventurous use of the medium than us publishers and arts organisations.
So right now, while we make really cost-effective use of older web technology (our cost per visit is now 0.2p per session!) we’re now clearly focussed on rebuilding the 24 Hour Museum to make the most of the new technologies emerging from what some people call web 2.0.
That doesn’t mean we’re going to adopt new technology just for the sake of it. Nick Poole, in his excellent opinion piece (Are Museums Doing IT Right?) published by us on December 5, 2006 advocated a more thoughtful adoption of web ideas that make the web work better for all of us. That’s what I’ve been advocating too, in various research papers, particularly The Inside Out Web Museum, for Museums and the Web 2006 at Albuquerque.
24 HM visit stats 2006
24 Hour Museum – the story behind the figures
Our rising audience figures hide some interesting trends – if you look into our stats, more and more users of the site are making their own web stuff with our content. MySpace visitors seem to be on the up and they commonly appropriate (ok then, they ‘nick’) our images for their own MySpace sites.
This is an increasing trend and it’s not going away. Looked at using the values of the past, it could be seen that image hijacking is a bad thing. But is it really? Is it bad that web users get to right-click and copy cultural content and present it in their own, usually fun-orientated sites? I don’t think so – it’s a new facet of cultural consumption that we need to start catering for.
In marketing terms, it could be seen as a new usage pattern occurring within mass publishing that spreads the brand message further than the conventional, linear, static channels. How do we make the most of these new audiences? For the last three years we’ve been observing similar unorthodox trends as a result of our RSS activity. These new challenges are not going away…
As soon as I took the editor’s chair at 24 HM in January 2001 my own interests in disability issues and accessibility challenges came out in our content ideas. It’s not just words - if you’re a 24 Hour Museum regular you’ll know we pioneered the use of accessible Flash MX in a museum web game with Eureka in Bradford.
So it was with great pleasure we attended the 2006 Jodi Awards as partners behind the running of the award. At the prize giving event at the British Museum on April 6, 2006 it was clear that strategic planning and marketing input from 24 Hour Museum had contributed to the real step up in impact the awards achieved in 2006.
We’re keen to follow on with issues that arise as partners in the Jodis. Knowledge gained in the awards will inform the accessibility of our new website, planned for May 2007. And in the 24 HM office we encourage opportunities for writers with real life experience of disability issues. As a result we’ve had some really positive experiences that have enriched our own team.
Now we’re poised to add a quite distinct disability heritage and arts content theme on the site. Our first example of new content on this theme was Jacob Simon’s erudite and authoritative piece about 18th century attitudes to disabilities. Jacob is Chief Curator at the National Portrait Gallery and he guided us through the portrait collection, bringing out new insights to the works.
24 Hour Museum has been a patient, persistent and positive partner in the annual Museums and Galleries Month since 2001. In 2006, for the third year running, we were pleased to be running a writing competition for student journalists; as well that we worked with the BBC, supporting the People’s Museum TV series, which ran all through MGM 2006.
As ever, we try to bring an extra sparkle to projects we join. As part of MGM 2006 we joined Colman Getty (MGM’s excellent PR agency) to work up a not-terribly-serious audience survey. We gave them the seed of an idea – have you ever fallen in love in a museum or gallery?
This simple bit of PR posturing ended up with a major online survey which, not surprisingly, came up with quite a few people who had fallen in love in a museum – in fact one in five people! All the national newspapers picked up on the survey story and it was great publicity just as MGM 2006 kicked off.
24 Hour Museum’s international reputation as a cultural portal was reinforced by our key role in the Culturemondo group, which meets regularly to compare notes about best practice in running national arts and museum websites.
In July 2006 our continuing sponsorship of the UK Museums on the Web conference saw a busy and inspiring conference in Leicester attracting a record number of participants and the reputation of the event keeps on growing. As part of our contribution to UKMWEB, we organised and chaired three substantial sessions and invited, for the second year running, a keynote speaker from outside the normal museum arena.
Simon Waldman, Digital Director of The Guardian, was thoughtful, intelligent, and added new perspectives for the conference about the new wave of the web. It’s one of 24 Hour Museum’s constant editorial themes – we’re journalists and writers, with skills from outside the sector – so what can we bring in from that world outside that might add new insights to the museum community?
Looking outwards to other web places is key to developing our own site – and it helps when we try to understand what is happening in the digital world, as the revolution of web 2.0 rolls on.
To try to get to grips culturally with this new world, in spring 2006 we worked closely with Mike Lowndes (Natural History Museum) Ross Parry (Dept of Museum Studies, Leicester University) and Nick Poole (Director, MDA) to put together a bid to the AHRC for funds to establish a cluster of seminars. These would be tasked with discussing developments with the Semantic Web – a future web technology that might make the whole thing work better for all of us.
The idea is not to be yet another talking shop. Already some clear simple steps have been identified that could easily be adopted by individual museum staff to get us a bit nearer more effective collection digitisation, for example. Another suggestion from the group involves making some informal but interesting ‘web mashups’ combining live museum databases.
More seriously, it is likely the group will make strong recommendations to our funders and strategy-setting groups as to which technologies ought to be considered future building blocks for the cultural web of the future.
This lobbying effort will take the group into new political territory for our sector, akin to the agenda-setting statements by social sector or political thinktanks. We hope this will be the case – the SWTT group has included leading academics, software developers and national museum curators. It’s gathered expertise from all over the world, and we hope any recommendations, roadmaps for the future or precise proposals for new practices will be given the credibility they deserve.
This year we’ve heard a lot about YouTube, MySpace Flickr and so on. What’s the buzz behind these sites? How does it affect us in the cultural sector? That last question really sums up quite a lot of the attitudes I hear expressed at conferences and so on. It affects us in the cultural sector because sites like MySpace are cultural. These new spaces are already being used creatively and using a broader definition of what constitutes culture we can see they are massively popular places where new audiences for art, history and heritage have sprung up almost overnight.
We could call these new web places meta environments. They are webs within the web – digital domains where people often use tagging to make objects or content findable by others. There’s typically a lot more relational connection or semantic connection between content in these meta environments. Like blog sites, these web places are very much more connected by meaningful links than the old, mark one, ‘outer web,’ the web that is joined in a passive, flat way by passive html links.
Work like this strongly indicates there are audiences using new web environments that are sophisticated, numerous and worth publishing to. To begin to understand how it works, 24 Hour Museum has joined the Natural History Museum and a few other national organisations (and some regionals – Wolverhampton Art Gallery deserve a mention here) in putting museum media clips on YouTube.
Within a few days, the 18 Dress Codes films we uploaded (on behalf of the East Midlands museum hub) had been viewed a total of 300 times. Doesn’t sound a lot in bigger publishing circles, but these are small scale, niche audience, volunteer produced films that had no other mass audience outlet, other than being posted out to people as DVDs.
Publishing into meta environments like this will certainly become one of the most interesting new routes to our audiences in 2007, and we’ll be looking to exploit this as much as possible. For example, if we’re producing new trails this coming year with original pics and media, it’s likely we’ll be exporting the media files to YouTube, iTunes and Flickr as a matter of routine.
In the main, stories on 24 HM are kept simple, accessible, tabloid and functional. The point of this is to get lots of coverage up on the web of our great arts and museum sector. We also keep it simple so our stories don’t compete with content on museum websites we’re linking to.
In 2007 I’d like to hear from you if you’ve got an interesting perspective to offer about museums, the web, history, heritage, art or anything you think deserves greater exploration. We can't guarantee to publish everything - but we're always up for new ideas and new writing and always give different perspectives a fair hearing. Go on, give it a try!
