Tag Archives: Tumblr

When progress usurps progress

With the World Wide Web twenty years old today, this post takes a cursory glance at how online tools have evolved over the past two decades.

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.

wip

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

‘Rebel Mouse’ for museums?

Rebel Mouse, a new ‘social front page’ founded by former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry, launched a couple of weeks ago.

In form and function, Rebel Mouse is a cross between About.me, Paper.li, Storify, Tumblr, WordPress and Pinterest. It aggregates the links and photos that you share on Facebook or Twitter and feeds these in to your Rebel Mouse homepage.

The beauty of Rebel Mouse is that it can be as hands-on or hands-off as you wish. It automatically updates your page in line with your Twitter/Facebook account. There are also settings enabling you to feed in specific hashtags and an option that saves all imported items as drafts allowing you to edit your content at a later time.

So what’s the big deal? Isn’t this just another social media site to play with? What’s in it for museums?

The achievement of Rebel Mouse is its simplicity. Rather than send people off to your various different social media pages, direct them to Rebel Mouse. It is here that one will get a general, overall view and feeling of your organisation.

In the future, there is the potential for Rebel Mouse to host topic/category pages like Pinterest. Can you imagine the interest in a ‘museums’ stream that collated the social media content from different organisations?

You can find us on Rebel Mouse here.