Day 1: MW2007

So this is not liveblogging. This is... something much different. It's deadblogging? I don't know, but I sure am beat. I didn't realize conferences were so tiring! My last one certainly wasn't. I guess this won't so much be blogging about the conference as my perceptions of it. All the papers are online anyway.



Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive totally rocked my socks at this morning's opening plenary. The potential for hosted material is astounding! I'm sure you can find a better summary elsewhere, at Museum Blogging, perhaps. It was awesome though. Go superlatives!

The Web 2.0 session was really engaging. Jeff of Eye Level gave an enlightening talk about how Eye Level operates. Shelley and Nicole from the Brooklyn Museum rocked my socks with the awesomeness that operates out of that place. And then I started to get tired. And stayed tired through Community Created Content and Tagging and Terms.

I am tickled to death that this corner of the internet has managed to get me recognized by total strangers. Today, Bryan Kennedy of Science Buzz did a double take and said "you're ..... " and I confirmed I was indeed in his museum, reading and analyzing his blogs. And at the Graduate Student Forum, this guy sat across the table and said "How's your blogging research going?" I cocked my head and squinted at him "Do I know you?" Turns out to be Richard Urban from Musematic. All is madness.

The graduate student forum turned out to be quite intimate. It was nice, but very small. There is the usual amount of feeling inferior to grandiose research. I'm still in this mode of, um, I'm just doing this cause I think it ought to be said and I can't find where it's been said before.

I'm very excited about the Radical Trust session tomorrow: I think it's going to be massive. And awesome. Massively awesome.

Predictions and Observations
Okay. So you know what? I don't think museums have got this whole concept of radical trust. I think museums are terrified to let users contribute content (including comments), with a few exceptions, who tend to be quite successful. Eye Level's comment screening is almost draconian. Not that they're censoring criticism, but it is a VERY Heavily Controlled blog. But Eye Level manages to seem to work. SAAM seems to have achieved its goals, anyway. Nonetheless, it has the fear, I think.

Despite this fear (or at least lack of trust), I see a barrage of new museum blogs coming out in the next 6 months. And I see most of them failing. Because of this fear. I think many of them are going to have a case of institutional petrification and will not be agile enough to move and adapt with the internet. These are blogs that will be blogs for blogging's sake, or will be trying to translate (relatively successful) offline programming into an online format which will dramatically reduce it's efficacy. I'm wondering if there won't be a backlash from the older, less trusting, less participatory web savvy attendees next year or the one after, complaining about how blogging failed for them. Because I was, frankly, a little startled by some of the points of conversation brought by attendees in the blogging workshop.

That's all for now. I need to sleep sometime.