myths and realities

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• myths and realities
• nickcrofts vice chair ICOM/CIDOC,
• Patrimonial Asset Management,
• International Olympic Committee

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Web 2.0 on the Gartner curve

• 2000 Early take up
• 2004 Enthusiasm
• 2007 Trough of despair
• 2009 Signs of more stable interest?
• Or just the sleepy Swiss waking up?

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The headless chicken syllogism

• Hey, weve got to do some of this Web 2.0
  stuff!
• P1 We must do something
• P2 This is something
• C1 We must do this

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Pause for thought

• Now that organisations have a clearer idea of
  the benefits which Web 2.0 can provide it is now
  appropriate to "stop doing and start thinking".
• Brian Kelly - UKOLN Museums and the Web 2009

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Web 2.0 - Whats in a name?

• Looks like a major software release
• Coined by Darcy DiNucci in her 1999 article
  Fragmented Future
• Popularised by Tim OReillys 2004 Media Web 2.0
  conference
• Criticised by Tim Berners-Lee 2006 Just a piece
  of jargon

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Some definitions 1/4

• Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the
  computer industry caused by the move to the
  Internet as a platform, and an attempt to
  understand the rules for success on that new
  platform
• Tim O'Reilly Web 2.0 Compact Definition Trying
  Again

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Some definitions 2/4

• Web 2.0 is a platform of collaboration, a place
  where users can share, can interact, and can
  build up on the work of their own as well as that
  of others
• Its web For the people, By the people and From
  the people
• Anant Shrivastava, web 2.0 an introduction

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Some definitions 3/4

• Web 2.0 is the use of disintermediate
  data-driven platforms to create AJAX-enabled
  folksonomies that deliver semantic-enhanced,
  intra-dynamic end-user services thru continual
  beta release cycles and innovative, user-centric
  ad delivery.
• Web 2.0 Bullshit generator

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A characteristic definition 4/4
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Tag clouds

• THE Web 2.0 signature gadget
• Concepts represented by words
• Size and proximity defined by statistics
• No links or relationships
• Language without the grammar
• The way that full-text search works!
• The way that users query?
• Sloppy, or honest?

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Kesoftware.com on http//tagcrowd.com/
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Folksonomy - Tagging by crowd

• Informal taxonomy
• The idea behind tags is to label things, so
  theyre loosely related to categories or (even
  more loosely) ontologies. Tags typically arent
  applied by specialists in keeping with the Web
  2.0 philosophy they are applied by the person
  writing the blog post, or uploading the photo, or
  storing the bookmark. So you get
  near-duplications, misspellings, incorrect
  usages, double meanings etc., but at least you do
  have some sort of categorisation applied to these
  bits of content. And many people go to quite a
  lot of effort to see what sorts of tags other
  people use, and then pick the same ones where
  possible. This then ends up being a folksonomy.
• Lauren Wood Blogging about web 2.0

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Ontologies the semantic web

• Sometimes co-opted into Web 2.0
• Meta-utopia
• machine-readable web RDF, SKOS, OWL
• Highly structured, organised metadata
• Not the same approach
• Not sloppy or lazy unrealistic?

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steve social tagging project
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steve social tagging project

• A folksonomy of 36,981 terms was gathered
• Tagging significantly different to museum
  vocabulary
• 86 of tags were not found in museum
  documentation
• 88.2 were assessed as useful by museum staff
• 46 of users always contributed useful tags
• 5.1 of users never assigned a useful tag

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Web 2.0 Technical

• Prettier, easier to maintain
• Ajax
• XHTML
• CSS
• Encourage sharing and resuse (mashups,
  syndicated content)
• RSS
• REST
• SOAP
• web APIs

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Digital photo library mashup...
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Obstacles are not just technical

• Developed in 2003
• Combined existing content
• api calls for translation (FR,EN,DE), indexing
  and query parsing
• One month development
• 2009 Linstitution ne peux pas confier des
  informations aussi vitales à des systèmes
  précaires.

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• Allows people to meet, communicate, form groups,
  organise their lives
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• and generate content!
• Google, yahoo, ebay, amazon, del.icio.us
• Monitoring and harvesting users input

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Iconic web 2.0 apps
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User generated content
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User generated content
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For comparison
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User-generated enthusiasm
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Professional UGC
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Sustainability is a problem
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Powerhouse OPAC 2.0
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Powerhouse OPAC 2.0

• Next generation online collection browsing
• Access to 62,000 object Emu records
• Tracks user behaviour and searches,
• recommends similar objects
• dynamically ranks results based on user
  interaction
• Incorporates a folksonomy engine allowing users
  to tag objects for later recall
• Intelligent, selective approach to Web 2.0
• www.powerhouse.com/collection/database

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• Jargon and techno babble
• Oversimplification, quick-fix approach
• Sustainability/instability of Mashups
• Getting users to generate content
• Ownership and preservation of content

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Conclusions

• Humility
• there are many ways to describe the world
• outsiders (clients, end-users, the public) can
  make a useful contribution
• Web 2.0 can be desconstructed
• take only what you need
• It is now easier to share and aggregate content
• If we want to
• The museum as a social networking environment is
  an opportunity to explore