back row snap of the event
I first saw Sebastian Chan speak at Web Direction on 2007. He presented on social tagging (“folksonomy”) projects at the Powerhouse museum. The first of these projects was the digitisation of electronic fabric swatches. After that the entire collection was digitised and published available for public classification. Recently I saw him present and got an update on these projects.
When I first saw this case study presented in 2007 the stats amazed me:
- 95% of all available objects were visited at least once in the first 10 weeks of the collection being published online
- 86% of tags created by users were not found in museum (curatorial) descriptions
- 88% of tags were assessed as useful by museum staff
Dae Levine and John Johnston on stage
Lessons learned from John Johnston, Social Strategist of original Earth Hour strategy
The core of the original Earth Hour strategy was the combination of user generated content with brand assets that were licensed as open source. There was take up from people, organisations and creative agencies; the latter happy to have the opportunity to work with an open brief. The major points of Johnston’s talk were:
- Keep the message simple. User generated content is easy when people like the message.
- Encourage others to build grass roots campaigns and facilitate them creating profiles (Twitter profiles, Facebook pages) and their own material with open source assets.
- Seek partnerships with organisations that can help spread the message.
- Outreach to bloggers.
- Don’t intervene. Let conversations flow.
- Don’t stop at English. Translate collateral into other languages and outreach to regional blogging networks.
The first Digital Citizens event tonight was a robust discussion on personal versus private online. The title of the evening was Private Parts: Personality and Disclosure – Finding a Balance in the Digital Space. Surprisingly it was the lawyer on the panel, Adrian Dayton (of Social Media for Lawyers) who was sounding like the ad man encouraging people to establish their personal brand and get it all out there on twitter. Sam North of Ogilvy PR, was reminding people of their contractual obligations to their employers and clients with words of warning to not speak badly about them. But, as ever in the social media space the lines quickly become hard to define. As soon as he described Ogilvy’s social media guidelines Damian Damjanovski of BMF spoke of one’s digital footprint, and that if we are active on social media platforms we will become traceable someway or another regardless of privacy settings on the content of accounts. The discussion then turned into what should one disclaim in their profiles: do you disclaim who you work for? Do you express the views as yours and not representative of your employer?
webDU logo
May 21 and 22 was the 7th webDU and my 3rd as part of the Daemon team who organise the event. WebDU is a technology conference, primarily but not solely, focused on developers. Amongst all the code and whiz bang-ery this year was an entire track dedicated to the consulting and planning side of projects: Team/UX (user experience). The room was packed for the whole two days.
As a non developer, the theme I took away from webDU 2009 was prototyping. Delivering prototypes be it a wireframe or design, that are closer to the final web page or web application.
Both Adobe and Microsoft debuted products at webDU. Steven Heintz of Adobe talked up the re-branded Flash Catalyst. Anyone familiar with the Creative Suite can now deliver interactive wireframes and designs to developers. As Steven put it in the keynote Flash Calatyst seeks to “make interaction more of a design experience“.
Comments