Ok. It’s opening plenary time here at Museums and the Web 2008. I didn’t manage to do any blogging yesterday – that’s what an entire day of workshops followed by immediate dinner and wine does to you…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Michael Geist<\/a> is the guest speaker: “technology advocate and trouble maker”. I like him already \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael spent his talk going through a number of sites and examples, some of which will be very familiar to us web types; others a little less well known. The examples which particularly jumped out for me (for two different reasons) were the Facebook group Fair Copyright for Canada<\/a> which was started by Michael, and his example of opening up the book “In the Public Interest<\/a>” for free download.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Facebook group example was particularly powerful because it caused demonstrable change<\/strong> in the real world. This was actually a running thread through many of the sites that Michael showed: virtual experiences are one thing, but “real” world responses to these virtual experiences are happening too, and that’s a hugely important thing to focus on. I’ve used this to defend Twitter recently (yes, I know the irony, having said bad things about lifestreaming<\/a> before…) – Twitter has recently got me back in touch with people out here in the real world, and that gives it a legitimacy and power that it doesn’t necessarily have “just” online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The “In the Public Interest” example demonstrated (although Michael didn’t give any actual figures) that free download actually increased<\/strong> sales. I like this because it continues to support the Scarcity vs Scale argument which I’ve pitched on this blog previously<\/a>. It’s a very pertinent discussion; Brian and I are giving a paper on Openness<\/a> on Friday at which we’ll be focusing on open content (among other things). Already this week – and in my experience, always <\/strong>within the sector – this discussion rumbles alongside most things we try to do on the web: API provision, Web 2.0, UGC or getting collections databases online. The more evidence there is that this approach works (or not!), the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The overriding message from Michael for me is that online activity causes, extends, pushes “real” activity in very valuable and increasingly tangible ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ok. It’s opening plenary time here at Museums and the Web 2008. I didn’t manage to do any blogging yesterday – that’s what an entire day of workshops followed by immediate dinner and wine does to you… Michael Geist is the guest speaker: “technology advocate and trouble maker”. I like him already \ud83d\ude42 Michael spent … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[13,101,136,137,14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}