Online, Can a Museum Be A Person?

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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[This is the English version of post originally published on c/blog]

Are museums people?

What is a museum online? A website is a destination so visiting a museum’s website is analogous to visiting its building—it has an address on the internet just as it has an address on the street (assuming it isn’t a virtual museum!) The same term, “visitor,” is used to identify you both when you view the museum’s homepage and when you walk through its doors. In email, sending an inquiry to the main museum email address isn’t much different from calling the museum’s main telephone number. Email and websites were born in institutions—the first people to have either in large numbers were at universities—so models were easily found for the existing needs and practices of museums.

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Craft the Backs of Fences

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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Gawker recently published (Oct 28, 2011) an article, “The Most Anal CEO Ever,” that’s a little bit myth-making, a little bit making fun of a man’s eccentricities,  but can’t quite decide if Jobs was brilliantly sweating the small stuff or tyrannically wasting people’s time. The gist is that Jobs cared a lot about things that nobody else would ever care about. His success is left on the table as some kind of argument, and the writer gives in to the temptation of letting his behavior seem pretty crazy (like tearing off his oxygen mask because he hated the design) but doesn’t dig into why this might be a good thing sometimes. On the one hand we see him taking forever to redesign the interior of his private jet with brushed-metal buttons; on the other he sends an excited engineer back to the drawing board to enable rectangles with rounded corners in the Mac interface.
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Open in a new Window with Google Event Tracking

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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Tracks by Steve Crane

Google Analytics event tracking doesn’t play nice when you’re trying to track clicks on links that open in a new window.  I recently ran into this problem on guggenheim.org and found that is a frequently asked, poorly answered question on forums, etc. Here’s how I solved it with a very little bit of jQuery

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Prediction: When will the Met have 500K fans, MoMA 1 million?

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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Passé / Futur by an untrained eye (via Flickr)

(Update below)

My list of Museums on Social Media now automatically updates Facebook and Twitter numbers, and even after a few days this has provided enough data to make some predictions. The two museums with the most “likes” on Facebook, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, are close to big milestones.

The Met was less than 10,000 short of 5oo,ooo likes as of May 30, 4:15pm EDT and gaining 1 visitor every 22.59 seconds (interactive graph here). At that rate, they should reach half a million likes sometime around June 1st 11:06:33pm EDT.

Now, MoMA is the André the Giant of museums in the social media ring. As of May 30, 4:15pm EDT they had 763,454 likes. MoMA gets one new like every 18.83 seconds (graph), so they should become the first museum to reach 1,000,000 likes on July 21 at 5:41:32pm EDT.

Congratulations in advance!

Update, June 2 11:30am: The pace slackened (one new Like every 44.79 seconds) so the Met didn’t quite make it to 500,000 at the predicted time, but they’re getting very close. Revised prediction: June 4th, at 5:02:03am.

(Image: “Passé / Futur” by an untrained eye)