myths and realities

nickcroftsvice chair ICOM/CIDOC,

Patrimonial Asset Management,

International Olympic Committee

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?

The headless chicken syllogism

“Hey, we’ve got to do some of this Web 2.0 stuff!”

P1: We must do somethingP2: This is somethingC1: We must do this

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

Web 2.0 - What’s in a name?

• Looks like a major software release…

• Coined by Darcy DiNucci in her 1999 article Fragmented Future

• Popularised by Tim O’Reilly’s 2004 Media Web 2.0 conference

• Criticised by Tim Berners-Lee 2006 “Just a piece of jargon”

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

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… It’s web For the people, By the people and From the people”

Anant Shrivastava, web 2.0 an introduction

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

A characteristic definition … 4/4

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?

Kesoftware.com on http://tagcrowd.com/

Folksonomy - “Tagging by crowd”

• Informal taxonomy

• “The idea behind tags is to label things, so they’re loosely related to categories or (even more loosely) ontologies. Tags typically aren’t 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

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?

steve social tagging project

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

Web 2.0: Technical• Prettier, easier to maintain:

– Ajax– XHTML– CSS

• Encourage sharing and resuse (“mashups”, “syndicated content”) :– RSS – REST – SOAP – web APIs

Digital photo library mashup...

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 : “L’institution ne peux pas

confier des informations aussi vitales à des systèmes précaires.”

• 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 user’s input

Iconic web 2.0 apps…

User generated content

User generated content

For comparison

User-generated enthusiasm

Professional UGC

Sustainability is a problem

Powerhouse OPAC 2.0

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

• Jargon and techno babble

• Oversimplification, quick-fix approach

• Sustainability/instability of Mashups

• Getting users to generate content

• Ownership and preservation of content

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