Gosh, Mike… You’re a cranky old bastard, aren’t you?

I’ve had a quick poke around Creative Spaces. Wow! I think the best thing about it is that I can see things from 9 institutions all in one spot. That’s a huge achievement, and I thoroughly agree that to put this project together has meant a delightful change in internal, cultural perspective within each of the participating institutions. I wonder now how others could come on board…

What’s missing for me from the current implementation is a sense of its identity. There’s no information available to me about who is responsible (I can’t click on the NMOLP logo to go anywhere, there’s no About page etc). One thing I think you need if you’re going to go down the social media route is a sense of who’s behind it, and what they’re up to. It feels a bit voiceless/nameless at the moment, so there’s no real impetus for me to *help*.

Everyone should bear in mind that Creative Spaces is *very new,* so probably doesn’t appear terribly “rich” just yet. 🙂

Perhaps another useful thing might be to work to Adrian Holovaty’s idea of building pages around lists of data. Think about how many pivots you can add to the browsing experience.

Personally, I’m not convinced that the current desire to “let the people in” to institutional presences online is quite the right approach. It’s *really* hard work to build a community online, and takes time to see results.

Perhaps the better approach is to release as much as you can to the web. It’s perhaps a semantic notion, but the difference between access (which implies something closed, needing protection) and release (which implies generosity and willingness to share freely) is useful. Creative Spaces is a good step towards this idea. FWIW, I agree that it would be awesome to provide feeds/API etc so other people could play with this new resource on systems other than Creative Spaces.

There’s a big difference between a social network and social media too. Social networks (Facebook etc) are great for conversations, but there’s nothing particularly bound to those conversations except a social relationship. A social media system (like Flickr) gives conversation a focal point. Giving an *object* a social life is profoundly more interesting to me. Dialogue around an object becomes an artifact in itself, and the way people imagine connections between objects often results in profound, original insight about relationships between things over time.