The internet was brand new and shiny in the early 1990s, but I’m not sure anyone really knew quite how dramatically it would change the world. Nowadays, almost every company or organisation has a web presence. Everyone from my local Indian takeaway shop to the museum down the road has a comprehensive homepage. These were, no doubt, contracted out to professional web developer companies or freelancers.

There is, however, a shift towards a more DIY ethos. @drewb alluded to this shift the other day by drawing attention to Cyclonix – a consultancy that moved its entire website over to Pinterest. This is an example of technological progress – Pinterest is easy to use and encourages interactivity – usurping what was once considered the height of technological innovation – an internet webpage.

Another, slightly different, example of progress usurping progress can be seen in the demise of Google Reader. When Google announced it was ending its RSS service, there were incandescent howls of protest. What would we do without our beloved content aggregator? Move elsewhere, to Feedly or Reeder, perhaps?

Well for some, Google Reader’s replacement is the very thing it could have once claimed to have buried – the e-newsletter. Email round-ups from sources such as Newsle follow the old tried and tested e-newsletter formula. They are just much better at it now compared to a few years back.  The e-newsletter is also useful since the emails can be archived in your inbox if you wish to revisit specific items at a later time. Furthermore, the fact that e-newsletters direct traffic to websites is beneficial to companies in terms of ad revenues. The RSS model, as Google have known for a long time, is simply unsustainable in pure business terms.

The progress usurping progress theory has, of course, been over-egged in the past. Cast your mind back a couple of years and there was a lot of talk about new-fangled micro-blogging sites i.e. Twitter and Tumblr replacing the mighty blog – a medium itself once viewed with suspicion by written print columnists and traditional journalists.

The point remains, nevertheless, that many innovations made online in the past two decades, once viewed as revolutionary, dangerous even, are now themselves beginning to be usurped. The World Wide Web is past adolescence and is now entering its twenties. Exciting times.

*image courtesy of @perconstantine

One of the first things I asked my new – temporary – army of followers was: which is your favourite museum or gallery in London? I was, to my delight, inundated with responses. What was telling, however, was that the vast majority of people didn’t name-check the museum’s twitter handle. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it struck me as rather peculiar. It was almost as if most people didn’t know that their favourite museum was on Twitter. Or at least, if they did, it wasn’t worth interacting with them.

Another thing that struck me was that most people’s favourite museums/galleries tended to be ‘nationals’. Hardly surprising I suppose. They are popular for a reason. All of them are world-leaders in their field. Their reputation for excellence means their visitor numbers far exceed small to medium sized institutions. As a result, they get more funding from government and corporate sponsors. A vicious circle if ever there was one.

No doubt many smaller, or ‘niche’, London museums do a stellar job in promoting themselves online. Indeed, they have to punch above their weight and intrigue audiences in ways that others don’t.

But are they really engaging potential visitors? Or are they essentially just talking shop to us, fellow museum types?

Oisin (pronounced ‘o-sheen’) rules the roost in Warwickshire. He is a Giant Irish Deer who lives in the Market Hall Museum in Warwick. Although officially extinct, Oisin is very much alive and kicking on Twitter @OisinTheDeer.

The Museum of Old and New Art’s Twitter is run by the MONA Monkey and it’s thoroughly entertaining. They’ve also got a cracking website and highly entertaining blog. @monamuseum

The Natural History Museum Dublin has its very own tweeting Giraffe, Spotticus. @SpotticusNH is very chatty.

The Museum of Hartlepool has the cute cartoon character @YuffyMOH.

Thanks to @JackShoulder for pointing out that @GlassJarOfMoles proudly resides at the Grant Museum.* The highly esteemed Haslemere Educational Museum is lucky to have Siberian @Arthur_the_bear as their mascot. At the Natural History Museum in London, a 20 tonne Diplodocus Carnegii looks after proceedings. @NHM_Dippy is 150, 000, 107 years young.

There’s also a whale on the ceiling of the Natural History Museum in New York City. @NatHistoryWhale

The Horniman Museum have their very own celebrity Walrus. Need we say more? @HornimanWalrus

Getting a bit niche now. Cornwall’s St Agnes Museum have a leatherback turtle. @stagnesturtle

Special mention must also go to @kidsinmuseums who celebrated their 10^th Birthday at the Royal Academy last night. Their Twitter account, which is run by the prolific @MarDixon, features a beautiful Quentin Blake illustration of a mammoth.

Did I miss any out? Let me know @davementi

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+ Update: Courtesy of @jennifuchs we have A list of tweeting museum objects, animals and other mascots. And more on #MuseumMascots on Social Media.

+ By popular demand, we have added the Postal Museum‘s very own @OWNEYtheDOG to the list.

*Thanks also to @ShapaBegum, @steveslack, @tonybutler1 and @AboutLondon for pointers!

On the surface, this should be an irrelevance to the world of museums. Especially for those of us who are interested in digital development and the use of new technologies.

Indeed for many, Song Reader might sound inaccessible, pretentious and, perhaps most pointedly, regressive. In the age of itunes, Spotify and Youtube, where music is available instantly and, more often than not, for free, why would people want to buy what is essentially a glorified tab book?

According to The Culture Show’s Michael Smith, Song Reader is seminal and offers real inspiration.  The concept questions how we experience and consume music in the digital age. We’ve become ‘negligent listeners’ and ‘the art of the album is wilting as a result’.  Song Reader is a direct response to this.

Beck challenges us to physically play instead of lazily, distractedly listen to our mp3 players. He urges people to experiment with the song sheet and play in different styles and musical genres.

Michael Smith’s review for the BBC got me thinking: for those involved in the arts, heritage and museum sector, Beck espouses very familiar objectives – participation, collaboration and independent interpretation.

Rather than plonking on a pair of Sennheiser’s and haphazardly scrolling through your iPod playlist, Song Reader demands personal input.  Passivity is not an option. Unless you want to stare at a blank sheet of paper. This is surely pertinent for museums. Visitors can stare into a glass cabinet curiosity and read the accompanying description, but this only ever offers a narrow and one-dimensional view. By putting the onus back onto the visitor to explore, in the mould of Song Reader, we are not burdening but empowering visitors to use knowledge in the way they want.

Song Reader is social. You don’t necessarily have to gather round a piano with the whole family and belt out an old music hall classic, but the concept does lend itself to sharing ideas with others. Museums are beginning to realise that many visitors also want to express and share their ideas. Whilst in the past visitors might fill out a comment card and drop it into the suggestion box, we expect more than a two-way dialogue now. We crowd-source recommendations, share photos, post blogs, comment, rate exhibitions, like, retweet, and pin all manner of things.

There is something strangely familiar and comforting about Song Reader. It celebrates the human element of music and pushes people back to the fore. Beck writes in the preface to Song Reader that, ”These songs, they’re here to be brought to life, or at least to remind us that, not so long ago, a song was only a piece of paper until it was played by someone.” Likewise, artefacts and museum blurbs can only really come to life when visitors engage with them.

Whilst not all of us are able to play instruments or perform in front of an audience, many of us are comfortable, often quite eager, to use new technologies to expand and build on our existing knowledge.

It is perhaps paradoxical that Beck’s Song Reader – a call to return to simpler times – inspired me to think about how we could harness new technology in museums. I don’t think, however, that Beck’s ideas are incompatible with museums of the future. So long as the technology available encourages us to explore, rather than consume, knowledge then that can only be a good thing.

On the bright side, we might well have the first comeback in social media history on our hands. Flickr, the comeback kid, has been a magnet for many disillusioned Instagramers. It would be interesting to find out how many of the ‘new’ Flickr accounts belong to former users, i.e. Flickr returnees, and how many are genuinely new.

Whilst Flickr rides the wave of popular discontent with Instagram, it might also be worth considering what else is out there. Check out EyeEm and Pi.pe for starters.

Happy snapping!

Read full article at Museum iD

•  I always look forward to seeing what the @sciencemuseum’s recommended #LunchtimeReading is. They scour the net for interesting and quirky stories, from ‘how fish oils help slow age decline’  to ‘what happens when you sleep and how it affects your every waking moment’ .

• The @Tate’s #TateWeather hashtag is very clever. They mirror, often uncannily so, the weather forecast and/or current conditions with a piece of art from their collections.

• The @DesignMuseum’s #FontSunday is a real favourite of mine. Each weekend they request followers to send in examples of a themed font. Recently this has included gold, and the letter ‘O’. Never thought fonts could be quite so fascinating.

• @NMMGreenwich’s #ODTH (on this day in history) thread is a great idea. Relevant bit.ly links to the museum’s extensive collections page are given for those wanting to buff up on their naval history.

• I’ve said why I enjoy following @MuseumSheffield before. Tweets from a wide range of people within their team offers something unique. An insight into many different minds. A sign of things to come, I hope.

So, who is missing from the list? I realise it’s rather dominated by hashtags so it would be good to hear if any museums are particularly good at other stuff. Do they speak with a human, rather than institutional, voice? Do they tweet/RT interesting links, twitpics or Instagram snaps? Do they engage with their followers?

The other day I went on an *unfollow* frenzy. I decided to stop following museums who tweeted stuff that I could just as well find out myself from the front-page of their website.

Perhaps the question museums should ask themselves is who follows them on Twitter. And why.  I suspect it is people with a pre-existing interest in their museum or subject area. And these people probably know how to find their way around a website. If they are like me, they don’t follow a museum for hourly repeats of its opening hours.

I propose that museums embrace the idea of having multiple Twitter handles to better engage past, present, and future visitors.

e.g. @MuseumofXYZ_Curator/ Marketing/VisitorAssistant/Institutional_Voice

I would also encourage the users of such accounts to include a human name and picture alongside their handle. If the account has more than one user, then name and describe them in the profile.

For the time being, I’ll stick to following real people who work in, or are passionate about, museums.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before I re-follow a bunch of museums.

Some refer to scenes such as this as interactivity in action. I’m not so sure. They were having fun. But who and what were they interacting with?

They were certainly not engaged with their surroundings. Despite being in a gallery of considerable architectural merit, most of the visitors seemed to be fixated on the audiovisuals and interactives.

I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a time and a place for games within museums. And as I’ve said many times before, pushing buttons does not equate to interactivity.

Rather than cram in as many artefacts, text, games, audio-visuals, and interactives into a [museum] space, get the basics right. Curate to a minimal. The job of the curator is surely not to overwhelm visitors but to pique their interest.

So you can imagine the feeling of incredulity that came over me when I overheard this conversation earlier today:

Visitor – ‘Excuse me, what’s the XYZ?’

Visitor Assistant – ‘It’s a temporary exhibition on at the ABC wing of the museum, Sir. Just £10 .’

V – ‘Oh right, bit expensive isn’t it? What’s it all about?’

VA – ‘I can assure you it’s well worth the money. It has over 400 exhibits inside…’

That’s right, 400 exhibits! The place is chockerblock with artefacts. I imagine there are stuffed Wildebeest sprouting from every wall and medieval pewter tankards rolling down the aisles.

Maybe there’ll come a time when museums will base their entry charge on the number of artefacts on display. 40p a piece still sounds a bit steep to me, though.