fresh + new(er)

discussion of issues around digital media and museums

fresh + new(er) header image 4

Why Flickr Commons? (and why Wikimedia Commons is very different)

January 25th, 2010 by Seb Chan
Respond

The Powerhouse is coming up to the 2nd anniversary of our joining the Commons on Flickr. Back when we joined there was only the Library of Congress and we trusted that we were making the correct decision back then. (I’ll be blogging an interview with Paula Bray around the time of the anniversary.)

A lot has changed at Flickr in the intervening time but I’m still confident that the Powerhouse made the right choice. In fact, the impact that joining the Commons on Flickr has had on the organisation has been unexpectedly significant. We’ve even started to move some photographic collections that were acquired as ‘archives’ into ‘objects’ in their own right. And photography is becoming an important marker of what we do at the Powerhouse. We’re delving into photographic competitions much more too and we’ve changed how we approach visitor photography too.

A couple of days ago Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum in London blogged a question – “Why do museums prefer Flickr Commons to Wikimedia Commons?”.

This was responded to by Liam Wyatt of Wikimedia Australia who outlined a case for why Wikimedia Commons might, in fact, be a better fit than Flickr – especially now that the Commons on Flickr is currently not taking new requests to join whilst they process the volume of existing applications.

For the Powerhouse the aim of placing some of our “no known Copyright” photography into the Commons on Flickr was to seed these photographs to a large, broader and interested audience who, in return, could add value to the collection by commenting and tagging the photographs.

Later, we’d find that other value would emerge.

The well documented Flickr API allowed for the construction of a good number of mashups and other applications to be built upon the photographs both by others and by us. We published a book, made easily and relatively quickly using the data.

For us the Flickr Commons is currently different from the Wikimedia Commons for a number of reasons –

1. Context matters a lot.

There is a reason why the Commons on Flickr has focussed almost solely on photographic collections, and that is because Flickr is a site that has been and continues to be designed for people interested in photographic images. As the Library of Congress stated in their initial rationale for joining Flickr, it was to “share photographs from the Library’s collections with people who enjoy images”. And where is the largest community of people with such an interest on the web? Flickr.

2. User experience and community

Because of this known user base Flickr has a well developed user interface and user experience which purposefully creates and helps encourage certain social norms and acceptable behaviours. The requirements of verified user accounts and personal information all work to reduce the negative effects of anonymity – critical in building a positive sense of community, even if they exclude some users as a result.

3. Managing that community

Flickr has a well developed set of community management tools and community managers who are employed specifically to ensure the community ‘plays nice’ and there is a hierarchy of escalation should it become necessary. The cost of US$25 per year is incredibly cheap for this.

4. A sense of content control

Uploaded images as well as any user generated content such as tags or comments can be removed at any time.

5. Statistics

Flickr has good enough tracking and measurement tools which are useful for checking where users are coming from, what they are looking at, and what they do. Ideally the statistics that we could draw from Flickr would be more useful and able to be downloaded in raw form and segmented – but even in the rudimentary state it is possible to see ascertain why there are sudden spikes of traffic to particular images, or when an image gets lots of comments.

The Wikimedia Commons is, currently, a pool of images which can be used for many purposes. However without visibly active community around the images they exist without a clear ‘intended purpose’. In fact they only encourage viewing or takeaway (download). For some people this is liberating – a resource without obvious legal or social constraints. But much in the same way a museum is neither a library or a “shed full of stuff”, the ability to have known manageable social constraints is in fact quite valuable.

I am pleased that Liam mentions the Wikipedia Usability Iniative and once this is completed the Powerhouse and others will no doubt explore the opportunities.

Even without direct participation in the Wikimedia Commons the Powerhouse has been interested to see that many of the images have been copied into the Wikimedia Commons. And then used to illustrate various articles in Wikipedia. This has been a fortuitous outcome but it was never a primary aim of the Commons on Flickr project – nor would it be one today. Other Commons institutions have not been as positive about this migration of content to Wikimedia.

For us, the overall community effect of Flickr and the deep engagement by a small but passionate group of Flickr users, has been the most positive result for us.

Whilst Wikipedia and Wikimedia are, in themselves, exciting projects, their structure, design and combative social norms do not currently make them the friendly or the protected space that museums tend to be comfortable operating in.

Whilst Liam (especially! 1 & 2) and many others are working hard to make Wikipedia and Wikimedia a better place for museums and their content, these are very difficult structural issues to resolve.

It is worth remembering that when the Commons on Flickr started it was the brainchild and passion of George Oates. She was able to ‘make it happen’. Now Liam Wyatt might be in a similar position – if Wikimedia were ‘less democratic’ (some might say dysfunctionally democratic). Except the structure of Wikipedia/Wikimedia makes that nigh impossible.

Nevertheless I’m excited about the strategic workshop in Denver looking at how museums might work with Wikimedia that will surface many of these issues. They are complex and many.

Tags: 7 Comments

Segmenting your ‘brand traffic’ in your web metrics

January 21st, 2010 by Seb Chan
Respond

Here’s another web analytics 101 post for you.

One of the important segments for your web analytics are those visitors who come to your website intentionally because it is your website – not just because you have content for Texan monarchists on it.

If you are a museum then this segment is the one that is most influenced by your traditional marketing strategies as well as by what exhibitions and events you have on. In terms of Brownbill and Peacock (2007) these are your ‘visitors’ and ‘transactors’.

So how can you set up a filter to segment this group out in your analytics?

First, in setting up any segment you need to think about how this group might come to your site.

In this case there are five probable ways – directly to your URL, via a bookmark, via an online advertisement, via a third party link, or via a search containing your brand name as a keyword.

Next, you need to look at each of these and figure out how to measure them with the tools you have available.

Direct traffic – easy – they will already be a default segment.

Bookmark traffic – these will be captured as direct traffic and you won’t be able to separate them out as a percentage but that’s probably OK. If you are really hardcore then you might want to segment by landing page here so that those who have bookmarked your funny video of ‘cats in the museum’ get excluded (they’re there for the content, not the brand most probably).

Online advertising – easy. Use your campaign identifiers, track them, and pour in that traffic too.

Third party links – now things are getting harder because in our case the vast majority of third party link traffic (like all our site visitation) is content-related not brand-related. This content-related traffic comes from all sorts of websites, blogs, tweets, Facebook and other places that link directly to a piece of content not because of ‘us’ but because it is ‘good’, ‘funny’, etc. If there are some specific URLs you know have been doing work with then add them in too but I’d recommend not including Twitter, Facebook etc as they are often best addressed as a separate segment altogether.

Search – if you have a relatively unique brand then you can segment out the search traffic containing that brand keyword and add that in. If you are really serious about separating the wheat from the chaff then it might be wise to add another level of filtering which only counts search traffic for the keyword resulting in visits that look at more than one page. (The only problem here will be that you will potentially lose traffic that is coming for simple information like your address – especially if you have tailored a mobile version of your site optimised for mobile traffic.) If you have a generic brand like ‘Australian Museum’ then you are going to need to figure out particular combinations of keyword search as well as landing pages.

Then you want to look at the results further segmented by geography – ideally you’ll find that this segment matches the target geography of your advertising campaigns both online and offline.

If you’ve got a growing brand and you’ve done the segmentation correctly you should see an upward trend as well as significant difference in behaviour of this segment and that of ‘all visitors’.

Ideally this segment should make more conversions (whatever they might be), have a far lower bounce rate and, where relevant spend more time on your site and look at more pages. You also want to be checking that this segment goes to the parts of your site that have been specifically set up for them!

Fingers crossed, eh?

In case of the Powerhouse doing a simple 10 minute analysis on this segment revealed that it made up 15% of our traffic for the past 6 months. We have a site heavy on diverse content so this relatively low percentage is not unexpected – if I was a retailer or I had a museum website with predominantly ‘venue information’ then I’d be worried! Visitors in this segment spent 2x as much time on site, looked at 1.6x as many pages on average, and were 30% less likely to bounce. They were also 3x more likely to begin their visit at the home page and also far more interested in the exhibitions and visit information than the collection than other segments of visitor. They were also 50% more likely to be from Sydney. The time on site and page view ratios for that Sydney segment were even higher!

Tags: 5 Comments

“Let’s make more crowns”, or, the danger of not looking closely at your web metrics

January 9th, 2010 by Seb Chan
Respond

Happy new year everyone.

I’ve got a bit of a backlog of posts but there is an ulterior motive for getting this out the door – and, well, it has been more than 18 months since I should have written about this.

Make-a-king's-crown---Play-at-Powerhouse screenshot

Over on our children’s website – Play at Powerhouse - we have a lot of content for children and parents to do at home either before or after they visit the Museum.

The website was launched in April 2007 as a way of segmenting off the ‘family’ audience from our main website and improving the user experience for that important group. Prior to its establishment, parents who just wanted to know what was on for their kids would have to navigate through exhibitions and events to figure out what was appropriate.

When the site was designed the main navigation was split into two halves – two very simple sections covering the practicalities of a museum visit, and two section for online and at home play.

And so in setting targets for the site we kept in mind that ideally we’d have a pool of casual visitors who we’d best serve by providing quick information that better helped them plan their visit to the museum; and a second group who we’d hope to build as ‘regular’ users of the site for craft activities, and to a far lesser extent, a few online games.

(Digressing briefly, we decided not to focus much on making ‘interactive games’ because there were already many established websites – in Australia the work of the national broadcaster the ABC especially – doing that as their main online focus and, frankly, far better than we could ever expect to do both in terms of design and also promotion).

The ‘craft’ section – Make & Do – was seen as a valuable resource that aligned with the Powerhouse’s reputation as a museum of ‘making things’ in a very crowded children’s web space. Importantly, too, we felt that it was good to support parents in giving them activities from the web that purposely meant doing things with paper and scissors, or out in the garden, anywhere away from a screen.

Over the past nearly three years the site has grown (and is on the schedule for a major UI overhaul!). It attracts a significant amount of traffic – peaking around school holidays as would be expected – and the craft activities, especially, are well linked by sites all over the world.

Internally the site has become integrated with the children’s programming as a whole to such an extent that the site’s Online Producer, Kate Lamerton, is moving over to join the unit responsible for general museum children’s programming. (In many ways this decentralising of content production is a sign of the maturity of the online product).

But that’s not the whole story.

As the site has developed we’ve tried to make user-led choices in the development of new content in the craft area. If the web is good at one thing it is data gathering. Very early on it the thinking of the site we felt that it was important to monitor what was popular and then use that as a means of thinking about what other content should be developed for the site.

Just to give you an idea of the resource burden of content generation – a single craft activity might take two to three full time weeks for Kate to conceptualise, prototype, and then create and instruction set for, photograph and upload. Some take considerably more, others, less.

So obviously we’d want to be choosing those craft activities wisely.

Now not every exhibition at the Powerhouse has obvious choices for craft activities for children, so Kate spends a fair bit of time thinking about ‘events’ to tie activities in with – obvious things like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day [1, 2].

And, because we care about web metrics, we are looking at what is popular and thinking about what I called ‘riffing’ on those – generally making ‘complementary’ thematic content.

But web metrics is a little more complex than that as I’ve said many times here (and in my workshops).

Here’s some data from the last two years.

Let’s first take a look at popular sections by page views for all visitors:

Content type % page views
Make & do (craft) 34.63%
What’s on (events & exhibitions) 24.16%
Play & interact (online games) 15.02%
Visiting (basic visiting information) 6.85%
Home page 15.85%

The first impression here is that the site is doing very much as planned.

The craft activities are generating the bulk of content views whilst the what’s on shows that site visitors are also more likely to be predisposed to visiting the physical museum. As expected with search driving most traffic on the web, the home page is less important as a single entity than each of the larger categories.

Let’s drilldown into Make & Do and see what is popular in there – the top ten by page views for all visitors.

Content type % page views
Craft index 24.63%
King’s crown 15.95%
Outback farm 6.02%
Easter index 3.72%
Knight helmet 3.34%
Princess hat 3.12%
Queen’s crown 3.07%
Masks for the ball 2.53%
Wizard’s hat 2.30%
Witch’s hat 2.14%

Here’s where things get interesting and where the initial thinking became skewed.

The clear leader – by far the most popular bit of craft – is the instructions and templates for making a King’s Crown. And appropriately we went along and made a fair amount of other types of ‘headwear’ – all of which have been popular too.

But are we serving our core audience? Who are these people who are coming to download the instructions for making a King’s Crown?

Let’s re-do those data tables again but this time let’s only look at traffic from Australia and then Sydney.

Content type % page views (all) % page views (Australia) % page views (Sydney)
Make & do (craft) 34.63% 21.06% 15.86%
What’s on (events & exhibitions) 24.16% 30.83% 33.85%
Play & interact (online games) 15.02% 16.12% 16.20%
Visiting (basic visiting information) 6.85% 8.64% 9.38%
Home page 15.85% 19.46% 20.58%

A different story starts to emerge.

Those craft activities are viewed by a far smaller proportion of site visitors the closer we get to our Sydney-based visitors. In fact, for Sydney-based visitors craft activities are even less popular than the online games on a percentage of total page views basis. Not surprisingly, though, by being located in Sydney and thus able to physically visit the Museum, the What’s On section increases in popularity.

Here’s those top ten craft activities again.

Content type % page views (all) % page views (Australia) % page views (Sydney)
Craft index 24.63% 35.29% 41.49%
King’s crown 15.95% 3.31% 1.90%
Outback farm 6.02% 3.97% 4.48%
Easter index 3.72% 7.01% 4.47%
Knight helmet 3.34% n/a n/a
Princess hat 3.12% n/a n/a
Queen’s crown 3.07% n/a n/a
Masks for the ball 2.53% 2.68% 1.96%
Wizard’s hat 2.30% n/a n/a
Witch’s hat 2.14% n/a n/a
Science index n/a 2.83% 3.16%
Easter baskets n/a 2.58% n/a
Speace helmet n/a 2.49% n/a
Mascot colouring in n/a 2.18% 2.68%
Healthy living n/a 2.02% 2.56%
Space index n/a n/a 2.19%

Now this is where it gets really interesting and where the team realised the importance of geographic segmentation. That headwear – the crowns and helmets and hats – wasn’t popular amongst local audiences. In fact, the more local we go the less popular it gets!

So much for putting resources into designing and making instructions for them!

Where was all this traffic for the King’s Crown coming from then?

Here’s the answer.

Country % visits
USA 53.96%
UK 14.27%
Australia 9.14%
Canada 5.42%
Mexico 1.34%

I’m glad our King’s Crown has been popular with Americans – in fact, predominantly Californians and Texans – but without the geographic segmentation being picked up early on in the life of the website we could have continued down that path oblivious to the irrelevance of that content to our local audiences (and the taxpayers who fund the museum).

Have you checked your popular content recently?
Is it really reaching the site visitors you are intending it to?

(Incidentally, if you are intending to attend Museums & the Web 2010 in Denver and wish to do my Web Metrics workshop then book quickly as it is almost full!)

Tags: 10 Comments

Nina Simon – The Participatory Museum – Powerhouse Museum 9/12/09

December 11th, 2009 by Seb Chan
Respond

A few days ago Nina Simon from Museum 2.0 gave a presentation to staff from the Museum and other cultural institutions in Sydney. Her talk, The Participatory Museum, was recorded live at the Powerhouse Museum and can be viewed below.

She has uploaded her slides to Slideshare too.

A huge thank you to Nina for her generosity in sharing her ideas and allowing us to share the recording with you.

(900mb, 75 minutes, intro by Dr Dawn Casey, Director)

View more documents from Nina Simon.

Tags: 2 Comments

The 2 in 100 who might matter most – your core web audience

December 4th, 2009 by Seb Chan
Respond

As some of you know I’ve been doing a series of deep dive web metrics workshops for various institutions around the world in the last couple of months and one thing I’ve been interested in is estimating the size of a ‘core museum website audience’.

Whilst we all like the big figures of casual visitors we get to our websites many institutions, having flirted with social media, we are beginning to realise that casual visitors, much like casual visitors through the door of a museum, aren’t so useful for building sustained co-creative relationships with.

This ‘core museum website audience’ is the one that is engaged enough with your online activities that they return frequently. The patterns and trends in how they behave in your website is likely to differ significantly from casual visitors, and these trends should be closely analysed for insights into which are your ’stickiest’ and most ‘interesting’ content areas.

Obviously, in looking at ‘repeat visitation’, though, it is critical to exclude all internal traffic. (I’m always shocked at how many institutions neglect, often through oversight, to stop their web analytics tools from reporting internal traffic!)

If we are serious about ‘engagement’ then our websites need to be actively growing repeat visitation as a proportion of the total.

So, how are we at the Powerhouse doing?

Looking at the Powerhouse Museum traffic for the last 4 quarters (Q4 2008 to Q3 2009) I’ve seen a sizeable number of repeat visitors to our website. Like most websites the vast majority of our traffic is new visitors (80.41%), but I’m pleased to find some interesting figures in our repeat visitors – the other ~20%.

Over the last 8 quarters repeat online visitation noticeably different patterns emerge around our in-gallery exhibitions and around our online-only content.

The ‘2 or more visits in a quarter‘ segment fluctuates most with the blockbuster exhibitions (Diana and Star Wars) showing the impact of return visitors booking online tickets and checking public event information. Here we see a rise from 13.63% in Q4 2007 to a high of 21.45% in Q1 2009 (Star Wars) before dropping again to 18.54%.

The ‘5 or more visits in a quarter‘ segment has grown steadily from 2.11% in Q4 2007 to a high of 5.22% in Q2 2009 and now rests at 4.78% in Q3 2009. This segment contains semi-regular blog visitors and those engaging with our collection online for research and study, as well as some of our high school curriculum focussed content.

The ‘10 or more visits in a quarter‘ segment has grown consistently, unaffected by the seasonal blockbusters, from 0.79% in Q4 2007 to 2.10% of traffic in Q3 2009. This traffic is our most highly engaged – again predominantly around our most consistent blogs (Fresh & New, Photo of the Day, Object of the Week), certain areas of our collection, and very specific curriculum content.

This 2.10% is one that needs a lot more analysis as does the ‘5 or more’ category. How do they arrive at our site? What are they looking for? What do they spend most time looking at?

Just for the record, as I’m using Google Analytics this data excludes RSS subscription-based traffic (critical for blogs), and does contain a low level of error – those who actively clear cookies (who may not be well represented in a core museum audience – but would be on, say, Slashdot). Of course, this data is far more reliable that log-based analytics.

I’m digging much deeper into this for an upcoming paper at Museums and the Web 2010 in Denver and of course my metrics workshop there too.

I’d welcome others’ opinions on this sort of audience segmentation.

Tags: 8 Comments

Calling all curators – a quick survey of attitudes

November 21st, 2009 by Seb Chan
Respond

One of my colleagues at the Powerhouse, curator Erika Dicker, is writing a paper for Museums and the Web 2010 on the impact of some aspects of digital on day to day curatorial practice. Some F&N readers will know Erika is the editor of the Powerhouse’s Object of the Week blog, and her paper uses it as one example of how even simple blogging can impact greatly on traditional practice in sometimes unexpected ways.

To this end she is conducting a survey and would be thrilled if your curatorial colleagues around the world could spend ten minutes and fill it out.

Tags: 6 Comments

Downloading, mashing and remixing our collection metadata

November 3rd, 2009 by Seb Chan
Respond

As you may know, we released our collection metadata a little while back as a downloadable archive. It is linked from both the NSW Government as well as the Federal Government’s Data Catalogues.

This has enabled it to be used in the current Mashup Australia contest and related Hack Day events and for the forthcoming Apps4NSW contest.

Luke Dearnley was recorded by Sarah Rhodes for the Govhack event in Canberra last week in the video above. You might notice Luke’s resemblance to the historical figure from the Smithsonian’s Flickr Commons collection in the background. Spooky.

If you do end up making cool things like BuildAR, Paul Hagon and ABC Innovation have done with our open data then please tell us!

And don’t forget to enter your mashups in those contests!

Tags: 4 Comments

Five rules for museum content (via Amsterdam)

October 29th, 2009 by Seb Chan
Respond

I’m just back from presenting at the New Museum Lab event in Amsterdam run by the Nationaal Historisch Museum. My talk was titled ‘Digital Effects: Content, Communities and the Museum DNA’ and whilst I won’t be publishing the slides, one thing that seemed to be of interest to a lot of people was this simple list of ‘five rules’. So here it is reproduced.

Museum content, not limited to objects, should be:

1. Discoverable – it is where I am and where I look for it. This means putting content where visitors expect to find it which online means good SEO, folksonomies and smart keywords, and onsite in the galleries it means great exhibition design.

2. Meaningful – I can understand it. Plain English contextual notes and label text, scaffolded where needed and definitely with an appropriate cascade.

3. Responsive – to my interests, moods, location. Content should ideally be able to be personalised with tailored recommendations. Mood responsive? Take a look at the Brooklyn’s handheld project.

4. Useable/Shareable – I can pass it on and share. All content should be released under a license that allows at least non-commercial sharing. Museums are entirely in the social objects business – let’s actually encourage sociality.

5. Available in all three locations – online, onsite and offsite. That means on the the museum’s website, on other websites, in the galleries if it is popular, and if it has a relationship to the outside world it should also be discoverable there as well. The later relies on geo-locations marked in the world either physically or virtually.

Nothing too remarkable here for regular readers or people in the field but sometimes lists are useful. You’ve probably noticed that each of these rules revolve around the notion of visitor-centrism.

Tags: 9 Comments

Visible data and behaviour change – Stockholm

October 25th, 2009 by Seb Chan
Respond

A quick off topic post from the road, having been re-reminded of Dan Hill’s Personal Well-tempered Environment in his presentation at Web Directions South a few weeks back.

My first impressions of Sweden, from arriving in the airport and catching the train into the city, were of a country that pushes its’ ‘green’ credentials upfront. All the transport from the airport to the city was ranked in terms of ‘eco-friendliness’. The public transport brochure for tourists proudly states that “(public transport) is good for the environment”. It then goes on to explain where the funding for public transport comes from (ticket sales, advertising, property rents and 50% from local taxes) and the number of jobs it provides for the community (14,000). This sort of additional information and context struck me as rather unique – certainly back home there isn’t any talk of where the funding comes from, and definitely not in the material produced for the tourist market.

What is striking about this is the use of ‘transparency’ as a means of encouraging certain types of behaviour – encouraging public transport use, and discouraging fare evasion. It also assumes a level of ‘good intent’ amongst readers.

This transparency extends to my hotel room where I am told that only 1/3 of people who stay in my room number reuse their towels more than one night at a time. This pales in comparison to the eco-friendly guests of Room 138 – they reuse at a rate of 87.5%! In defence of my room number – I expect, being a single room, my room gets a lot of single night stays and this skews its’ figures – (or the people who stay here are cleanliness obsessives). Again this is interesting because the hotel plays on the guest’s competitiveness and, again. assumes ‘good intent’ – can you beat Room 138?

stockholm-hotel

Then walking the city today I stumbled upon a piece of public art in Strandvägen that is fed by air and water pollution data. It looks like the work is quite old – and it gives a simple visualisation of pollution levels with a light sequence. Nothing too remarkable there except that it claims a real time data feed – something which I’m sure could/should be repurposed for online visualisations.

stockholm-obelisk

stockholm-obelisk-text

Food for thought.

Tags: 2 Comments

Augmented reality update – using Powerhouse geocoded photographs on your iPhone 3GS with BuildAR and Layar

October 17th, 2009 by Seb Chan
Respond

So you read about MOB’s implementation of the Powerhouse historical images in Layar for the Android phones . . . well, Layar is now available for the iPhone!

You’ll need a 3GS as it uses the compass for orientation but the Layar application is free from the App Store.

layar-itunes

Once you’ve installed Layar on your iPhone you need to configure it to use BuildAR as a ‘layer’.

To do this just perform a search within Layar for ‘buildar’ then select it.

Search and add the BuildAR layer

You can see here that I’ve added it to my favourite layers for easy reference along with Wikipedia and Flickr layers!

layar-faves

Then head out onto the streets of Sydney and see what you can find.

You can view objects overlaid on ‘reality’ or get a map or list view. Clicking an object presents you with a number of options including visiting the historic photograph on Flickr, on the Powerhouse site or map directions to get closer to the point at which the photograph has been geocoded.

Layar in action

layar-listview

layar-clickthru

Tags: 5 Comments