Blogs + Social Networking

Blogs very often incorporate links to other blogs, videos, audio, and slide shows. For instance, the MASS Moca blog has a feature called Flickr Finds. Flickr (one of the first Web 2.0 applications) is a popular image and video hosting website where users are able to upload their digital images and create albums and slide shows to share with others. A contributor to the MASS Moca blog searched Flickr for photos uploaded by users that feature a MASS Moca installation called Tree Logic and posted them on the blog with links back to each person's Flickr profile. In this way blogs personalize the museum and make visitor content an integral part of their online presence. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has created a widget that anyone can easily install on their desktop, website, social networking profiles, or blogs. The widget features a different work of art from the Rijksmuseum collection every day. When the widget is clicked on, it flips to the reverse side to reveal information about the piece and artist. Some may view this as nothing more than a novelty, but it certainly has the potential to keep visitors engaged, allow users to promote the museum, and even create enough interest that viewers are compelled to visit the museum and see a piece in person. Of course, blogs are not used exclusively by art museums that cater to the young and hip. The Children's Museum of Easton, also in Massachusetts, has a blog on which they allow visitors to vote on content and hosted a digital photo contest for parents' photos of their children participating in activities at the museum. They also link to their MySpace and YouTube profiles.

The Rijksmuseum widget is featured on this blog to the right. Click in the middle to enlarge the image or click the lower right corner to see the title and artist.

Directly below the Rijkswidget is the Global Museum widget which feeds information to this blog from globalmuseum.org.

(click image to see this blog post)

On the sidebar of this blog to the right, you can also see an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed from the MASS Moca blog. It shows links to the five most recent blog posts at any given moment. To subscribe to a feed from New Wave Museums you would use the "Subscribe" tools below the MASS Moca feed.

Folksonomy

Other museums geared toward children such as the Natural History Museum in London have entire sections of their websites dedicated to kids and often feature online games designed to engage and educate children. But other types of museums such as the Brooklyn Museum (which attracts a crowd similar to that of the MASS Moca) have realized that through gaming, the museum and the visitor can enter a mutually beneficial relationship. Folksonomy (referred to here as social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Non-expert users can classify as well as find information (this is how the MASS Moca blogger mentioned above found Flickr photos of that specific installation). Museums can use social tagging to help visitors find what they are looking for in an online collection. The Brooklyn Museum found a way to get people to help tag their collection by combining game mechanics with community membership to create a social tagging experience which they call Posse. After signing up, creating a profile, and becoming a part of the Posse community, users can play a game of, you guessed it, Tag. Posse members accrue points for each tag they assign to an object and are notified when they pass another member's score. The game also integrates videos with messages from the Brooklyn Museum staff that pop up when a Posse member reaches certain levels.

Below this and every other post on this blog you can see a set of tags or labels. For example, if you click on the words "MASS Moca" below, you will be brought to a page displaying all posts tagged with that term.