Category Archives: Museums

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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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)

Museumtweets Mashup

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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On April 18 Jim Richardson (@sumojim) posted a Google Spreadsheet containing a list of over 1,500 museums that use Twitter, along with their followers, Klout score and other data:

This has attracted a lot of attention and become a large collaborative project (with major contributions from @museumnerd, @museumsukkel, and @mardixon) but the spreadsheet itself is somewhat hard to read. Google Docs is a great way to work together, but not such a great way to spread information.

Because I thought it would be fun to try (and might save some people a lot of work!), I hacked together a web page that uses the Google Docs API to get the list of Twitter names from the spreadsheet, then uses the Twitter and Klout APIs to fill in the rest (plus a little more). The result, Museums on Twitter, is good enough to go live.

I had to write my own Python library for Klout, AukPilot, so that took a little time and right now (3:00 Sunday afternoon) a cronjob is still filling in the Twitter data. Over the next few days it should stabilize into a good overview of the data SumoJim and other shave collected.

Update #2 (4/27, 11:30pm EDT): I’m starting to add Facebook data. Have it for 40% of entries so far. Not bad for the first pass.

Update #1 (4/25, 1:15pm EDT): Most of the twitter data is getting automatically filled in except for some of the troublesome entries (sorting out what data Klout does and doesn’t always have; blank lines in Jim’s spreadsheet are causing trouble with the Gdocs API, etc)

Planned additions/tweaks so far:

  • Add Facebook data
  • Adding the countries from Jim’s spreadsheet
  • Making the columns sortable (I want this to be a nice JavaScript thing but that’s hard because the list is so long)
  • Click an entry to view its data in more detail

What else? Tweet or comment below