Our Blogs Reviewed

Our blogs got a short write up on mnSpeak last week. The post is short to the point and generally honest. The author makes the point that no one at the Walker ” has decided to really own a genre”. This totally makes sense and started me thinking about what a successful blog was and maybe it was my chance to clarify our goals with the New Media Blog at least.

So what is a successful blog? You could say a successful blog is a heavily read blog. Like an online popularity contest. I’m sure many readers think successful blog is a frequently updated blog with cool stuff on it or affcianados think a successful blog depends on having high quality original content on it. When we started on our New Media blog we made a concious effort to write original content for the site. This makes our production time longer and our post frequency lower but we did not want our blog to turn into a link mill. Sites like boing boing and We Make Money Not Art are great but a large amount of time goes into filling them up and keeping them interesting.

Being a link mill and growing your blog roll is a fun and easy way to gain readership and add chatter to the “blogosphere” but that is not what we set out to do with our New Media blog. We were trying to contribute original text and images to the internet so other institutions and professionals could learn from our processes, successes and mistakes. I know I was inspired to share our process by talking to people at the Museum Computer Network conference. Our blog seemed like a natural medium to promote a culture of information sharing with our collegues.

So right away the New Media blog was not going to register on many peoples radar as “cool” or “successful” just because it was bound to be a infrequently updated page full of nerdy stuff. (and art institutional nerdy stuff at that!). For our desired audience that could still be considered a success. I know that many of my favorite sites only update once a week and when they do update, I read that post right away because I know it will be quality and no where else on the web.

Every other department has a blog but the direction of their site is up to them. If they choose to make their blog a space to publish what is new and exciting and fresh in their field that could be a great thing. It makes a lot of sense for anyone curating or researching art work to publish short fast posts about “the new and upcoming”. I do know people here (and in general i think) are reluctant to add another technology to their lives unless they see a possible benefit and many of us are struggling to find out how to best serve our audience with this new technology (well it’s new to us anyway).

If you are interested in a lot of posts about “cool” things across mediums or departments I think the creation of our new Off Center Blog or our Monster RSS Feed (just noticed our big feed is down) might be what your after.