fresh + new(er)

Knowing your audience is critical yet being outside of North America often means that we end up justifying projects, strategies, methodologies on general audience data drawn from another continent.
The CCI at QUT has just published the latest ‘Digital Futures Report - the Internet in Australia‘ which is a very comprehensive look at how Australian internet [...]

The first three months of having images from the Tyrrell Photographic Collection in the Commons on Flickr have been very interesting. We launched on April 8 with 200 images and have been adding more each week since.
At the 12 week mark we had 600 photos uploaded, mostly location photography with just under 50% geocoded. [...]

Google Trends has started to allow domain level searches. This means that you can now pull up rough traffic figures, as calculated by Google, on any top level domain (subdomains like play.powerhousemuseum.com or artgallery.nsw.gov.au won’t work), and compare them to others. This moves Google Trends into territory covered by services like Compete, Quantcast (both US-centric) [...]

The most popular object in our online collection database is still a dress worn by Delta Goodrem.
I’ve previously written about how the popularity of this dress was driven in part by coverage on a number of Delta Goodrem fan forums. But this neglects the criticality of search. Google has always driven traffic to this object [...]

I’ve been wondering for a long time about the real popularity of Facebook apps that are targetted at specific niche user groups.
Well with Developer Analytics you can find out - without needing to be the actual developer of the Facebook application in question.
With the museum community starting to build useful applications like the Brooklyn’s ArtShare [...]

Here’s some of the latest figures from our collection database for the calendar year 2007. Because our search tables run on a rolling 3 month basis we have had to wait until April to generate the results for 2007.
In 2007 there were 15,121,291 objects viewed in our collection database (including views on dHub and via [...]

Google’s ’search within search’ or as they call it ‘teleporting‘ has hit the Powerhouse Museum.
I’m not sure whether this is a compliment or not, but as the New York Times reports, this is a very interesting development which raises many issues for content-rich sites with vested interests in their own internal search.
As you can see [...]

Last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art launched their Dashboard - a visual display of various data about the museum and its activities. Updated regularly the Dashboard gives open public access to much data that would usually be buried deep in an annual report.
The ‘transparency’ that the Dashboard offers is remarkable - it not only [...]

Josh Bernoff at Forrester has put together another good chart of how corporations might use social media to support five key functions - research, marketing, sales, support and development. He neatly ties together function, objective, the appropriate choice of social media application, and then a success metric for each.
Whilst the cultural sector may not have [...]

Musuem blogs, even when they are one-directional (and have comments turned off), need to be measured differently. Jim Spadaccini and I wrote about this earlier in the year, but now with many many more museums blogging it is time for an update.
At the Powerhouse we’ve seen phenomenal growth in our blogs. This very blog, Fresh [...]

I’ve been watching a lot of people using computers over the past few months and it struck me how many of them were using web-based email services - the more tech savvy were on Gmail, and the more casual users gravitated towards Hotmail and Yahoo Mail despite their flaws. An even smaller number used webmail [...]

Compete is one of several comparative ISP anayltic services that are doing some interesting tracking of how US internet users are behaving on particular sites and comparing them with competitors. One of their recent reports examines how users are behaving once they are on Facebook. We all know

Web Directions South 07 was lots of fun and there were some great presentations over the two days. Unfortunately conferences are always full of choices and I missed several presentations I’d been looking forward to catching. That said, overall the quality was high and there were only a handful of dull moments. Most of the [...]

It has been one of the worst kept secrets of web statistics - deep linked image traffic. While this has been going on for years, since the beginning of the WWW actually, it has increased enormously in the past few years. On some cultural sector sites such traffic can be very substantial - a quick [...]

It is important to realise that to deliver more effective websites we need to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach not only when designing sites but also when evaluating and measuring their success. We know that some online projects are specifically intended to target specialist audiences - a site telling the histories of recent migrants [...]

From Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng comes an interesting academic paper titled Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities.
Following my recent post looking at diffused brand identity in social media, this paper is a useful examination of the emergent ‘authority’ and ‘connectedness’ of users amongst a dataset of 75,000 [...]

There has been a flurry of activity amongst web analytics companies and in the marketing world to devise complex ways of measuring social media activity. As much of this interest in devising a way of measuring and comparing social media ’success’ comes down to monetising social media activity through the sale of advertising, these measures [...]

Continuing the theme of web analytics, last week I took a look at the top 5000 search terms (the head of a long tail containing over 4 million terms) searched for by Australian internet users in a 4 week period through a paid analytics service. This data is generally gathered from ISP logs and is [...]

Over the past few months I have been becoming more and more concerned about the use of web analytics in the museum sector. I’ve also been seriously re-considering the Powerhouse’s current anayltics tools.
Web analytics should be used to improve the ROI of online services; improve customer/user experiences; and drive traffic to the key areas [...]

Smashing Magazine have put together a splendid and pretty much definitive guide to how Google’s Page Rank works. It is full of links to more information. Essential reading.

Yesterday Demos UK released their report Logging On: Culture, participation and the web. It is available as a free download or can be purchased in a printed form.
In the brief history of the internet, the cultural sector has followed two related paths: on the one hand, the digitisation of content and provision of information and, [...]

Coming hot on the heels of all this talk of tracking user behaviour, Adam Greenfield proposes five ethical guidelines for ubiqitous systems in a recent keynote:
(1) all ubiquitous systems should default to harmlessness.
(2) ubiquitous systems should be self-disclosing (e.g. be clearly perceptible, “seamlesness” must be an optional mode of operation). proposal of 5 different graphical [...]

There are so many new ‘analytics’ tools springing up. A while back I wrote about Clickdensity who also recently presented at Museums & the Web. Clickdensity’s heat mapping has been an excellent tool for us to better understand how real world users have been using elements of our navigation and screen design. Clickdensity’s visualisation of [...]

Avinash Kaushik writes a very detailed post about the new-look Google Analytics that is rolling out across accounts right now.
Now, more than ever web analytics are essential. In my experience, web analytics at museums have been the last thing on people’s busy timetables. Most organisations report the most basic level of statistics to their funding [...]

In a most timely fashion for our recent discussions of ‘levels of participation’, from Forrester’s comes the ‘Social Technographics‘ report.

This is a very interesting and relevant report to all the museum sector. It breaks down user-types into several categories and then maps the differing proportions of each category as represented across different social media websites.
I [...]