Dulwich OnView is attracting new audiences via the web.

In an age when the drive to share ideas and information has seen websites like MySpace and Facebook muscle their way to the top, Dulwich Picture Gallery is showing how even 19th-century art galleries can take part in the online social networking boom.

Dulwich OnView is an online magazine that operates like a group blog cum cyber meeting place, and grew out of the desire of a group of writers and photographers - who all happened to be Friends of the Gallery - to try and attract new audiences via the web.

The aim is to celebrate people and culture in and around the south London area. Much of the focus is on arts, culture, local history and quirky stories - with one article in each edition having some relevance to the gallery itself.

The site also features pieces about pub quizzes, local celebrities, wine, mental and physical well being and good old-fashioned village gossip. There’s clearly much more to Dulwich than wax jackets and Dalmatians.

Much of the focus is on arts, culture, local history and quirky stories.

"It’s great to see an art gallery – seen by some as being boring and stuffy – acting as a catalyst for exciting new work and using the web as a tool to attract new audiences," said one of the Gallery Friends, Steve Slack.

“And because it’s online, our readers extend much further than south London. We know of readers in Australia and the US who have made useful contacts with others in similar fields of research through articles in Dulwich OnView.”

Not bad for a website that has been going only about six months and already it’s creating a real community online and proving itself as a real driver of traffic to the gallery’s official website. It now has eight co-editors and at least ten regular contributors adding six or seven new posts every week.

“It picks up hits for all sorts of reasons, mainly not connected to the gallery because its posts are so wide ranging,” added Steve. “These people then spot the links to the gallery and go to investigate.”

One article in each edition has some relevance to the gallery itself.

The word about the blog is evidently spreading – after a talk at the Museums and the Web conference in Canada earlier this year, the friends have received a flood of requests for help from other museums wanting to set up blogs.

The friends used the know-how of social media experts Yang-May Ooi and Angie Macdonald from Zen Guide, who are also Friends of the Gallery and provided their services for free.

For more information about the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery see:
www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/support_us/friends.aspx.

Read Dulwich on View at: http://dulwichonview.org.uk.