Nice post over on Mashable – Web Startups and the Lying Liars that Lie About Them – 10 “semi-truths” about new sites and the lies blog writers say about them. I particularly like
#6: “it needs more work”. Truth: if there was a state before alpha, pre-alpha, and super pre-alpha, this site would be it.
Maybe we need the same for museum websites…
Anyway. I’ve been working on my “museums are like over-protective parents to their web content” metaphor:
If we force our content to stay at home…
- yes, we’ll be reassured to know where it is and what it’s doing but it’ll never get a chance to form its own identity
- we’ll never give it the chance to meet different content and mash it up together in a dank nightclub out there in the big world somewhere.
- it’ll get fat, complacent and socially inept
- it’ll continue to think it’s the best content in the world and one day it’ll escape and realise that everyone else stopped wearing Doc Marten’s about 100 years ago
- instead of earning a crust, it’ll keep eating our food, drinking our pop and generally getting in the way
As (unfortunately) Sting once wrote. “If you love your content….set it free”. Or something.
May 28th, 2007 → 9:58 pm
[…] This is (museum) website 1.0. The user experience is there, on the site, with known edges, known paths. It is comfortable, comforting, understood – and ultimately flawed. The Facebook way is markedly different. Obviously it’s primarily a social network, and many hundreds of thousands of users will remain there and move around the site within this framework, never knowing what else is behind the scenes. But now, it’s also going to mutate into many other things – unknown, weird, wonderful, creative things. With a strong API, the data is set free. […]