Visitor Feedback on YOUR blog

I will soon be part of a panel at AASLH on visitor feedback and new technologies, so I would like to get your feedback and experiences. If you are a major player in your institution's blog and/or online presence, please consider responding to some or all of the following queries (in comments or email to lynnbethke at gmail dot com).

So tell me, what kind of visitor feedback do you (or your institution) receive through your blog and other online ventures (tagging ventures, twitter, facebook, and so on)? Do you solicit feedback through your online presence, or accept it passively? Do you acknowledge feedback in some way? Do you address this feedback internally? Externally? Do you mind if I get in contact with you to learn more?

Your help is appreciated, and any presentations I develop for this panel will be shared on this blog.

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Shifting gears

I just got back from two beautiful weeks of vacation and returned to a fairly full inbox and about 300 unread museum blog and museum-related blog feeds. In my mailbox at work was the summer issue of History News, the magazine of the American Association of State and Local History. And in the magazine, in the History Bytes column (get it? it's for web issues!), is the recent dilemma "To Blog or Not to Blog." Blog awareness has been here for sometime. I feel like I was able to produce my thesis at a point just as the blog wave was breaking on the museum shore, which is fortunate timing for a work like I produced. A thesis on blogging today would likely take a very different form, as there would be a great deal more material to work with, and a greater amount of material published on the subject.

But I am not writing a thesis anymore, so my devotion and fervor about blogging is beginning to fade. Don't get me wrong, I still think blogs are great, and really love when institutions speak with a personal voice and take you behind the scenes. I continue to hope that my museum's blog (which I write, not as often as I should) would be one I'd like to read.

No matter how this sounds, it is no eulogy. This was meant to be official notice that I am shifting gears on this blog. I'm widening up the focus. This has been happening for a while, but I'd not acknowledged it. For the time being, I am going to post as the mood strikes me and see what develops.

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Tag!

The Brooklyn Museum just launched online collections and has a tagging game you can play!

The idea is vaguely familiar... hmm....

The game is not as exciting and addicting as the Google Image Labeler which I played compulsively for a couple days back when it was launched. But the thank you video was definitely worth the registration, even if I only tagged 2 objects with 10 tags. I also appreciated the registration form telling me that my username was awesome (which, I assume, is not a judgment on how excellent I am, but that my username is unique). I will be looking forward to seeing how this works for the Brooklyn Museum.

A nice bonus of the tagging game is that it requires you to take a closer look at the art than you might otherwise, like this neat-o necklace that I tagged.

And I may even return to play again.

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