1.  Meeting the demand for information and knowledge
How many of you: Have heard of Web 2.0? Or read content in a blog or wiki? Do you
actively engage with a network like Facebook? Alternatively, have you used MSN Messenger
or Skype in a business environment? Do you use photo sharing sites such as Flickr?
Cultural observatories can meet the demand for information and knowledge by examining
the current online landscape, and leveraging existing platforms to collaborate and publicise.
What do we mean by the buzzwords ‘social networking’ ‘web 2.0’ ‘social media’ ‘cloud
computing’ and so on? We can define this type of interaction as online destinations where
organisations and users share information in a variety of formats (text, audio, and video)
and engage in multi-user dialogs around topics of common interest.
For many people there exists a high number of destinations. Large tracts of these cater to
niche interests and topics. We can briefly look at the geographical split (from ValleyMag in
August 2007) to see the prevalence of networks across the regions. An example of this is the
huge popularity of the Google owned Orkut for the Latin American audience, and the
popularity of communities on Facebook/MySpace within the EU and USA.
The key themes here are ‘sharing’ and ‘conversation’. The exploration of these online tools
for cultural organisations and businesses greatly help to meet the aims of
• dissemination of information
• raising profile
• raising awareness
• information organisation
• collaboration
• Etc...
We can look at an example of the provision of cultural information and tools online from
www.culture.info . In unison with Internet developments, there is an ever increasing emphasis
on user participation by providing services for interaction and engagement with cultural
experts. This is in addition to culture.info’s original remit of being a key destination for the
provision of information for the arts and cultural sector.
Culture.info has a unique position as a private company developing arts and cultural
information and tools for the sector. Revenue is generated through public and private sources,
including advertising. A key distinction for visitors and funding sourced is the integrity of
information through maintaining quality and standards, and this raises an interesting question
of a ‘user to information-provider’ relationship.

2. Content has always been king – both the volume (lots of useful and fresh content?), relevancy
(out of date? prominent keywords? indexing? related items?) and clarity of content impacts the
level to which an audience will engage and utilise information presented online.
We now turn to the presently available tools to assist cultural organisations to meet the
demand for knowledge and information. All the tools that follow are means of communication
and collaboration for intra-organisation; inter-organisation; stakeholders and the public
amongst others.
The first example of these sharing and conversation tools is Blogs. The number of blogs on the
web number well above 200 million. It is assured that at least some of these will focus on
discussions on culture, research and learning.
Features of blogs include:
• Commenting on posts - expert contributions (called ‘guest blogging’).
• Some real-time chat facility.
• Alerted to new posts for key Blogs?
Benefits of using blogs include:
• Feedback on my thoughts and ideas
• Evaluation
Wikis are collaborative Web-based authoring tools. Wikis can be utilised for collaborative
papers and user generated content, which is generally editable by the public. In addition,
there are other Web based authoring tools which are known to greatly influence and
enhance productivity. Examples are Google Docs and Zoho.
The first example of sharing and conversation tools is Flickr. Benefits of photo sharing
include Photo sharing at events (e.g. this seminar) by tagging photos with a common name.
Another aspect of sharing is sharing bookmarks/links to news articles or pages you feel
would be interesting to your co-workers/the public.
Lastly, an example of leveraging other platforms is Google Maps Tools used by the
aforementioned example culture.info. For successful EU funded projects with UK based
partners under the Culture programme, the programs were plotted on an interactive
custom Google Map. Custom markers were used to store the geographic location of the
project, with clickable summary information.
Other tools not discussed today are also part of today’s digital landscape, and should be
considerations when seeking to build better collaboration/conversation tools. Examples of
these platforms include
• podcasts (syndicated MP3 files)
• Video Blogging and communication Tools (digital whiteboards, Skype...)

3. Web 2.0 applications can be used in isolation and are powerful when integrated into other
services. (E.g., notification of new content is shared amongst your facebook group; by
email; RSS feed as well as Twitter).
Looking at the internationalisation of information – where there is a need for the
translation of cultural information online, there are three options for internationalisation.
Organisations can employ manual translation using a paid translator or translation team.
Tools such as Google Translate; AltaVista can be utilised to produce outputted documents
according to sets of rules and community contributed translation. The third method is that
of user-contributed translations. An example of this is a request by Facebook to its Spanish
users to produce a local version of the site. Within 24hours, enough users had submitted
language translations to have a complete local language alternative.
What are the strategies for cultural organisations needing to meet the demand for
information and knowledge? It is crucial to open up appropriate content to international
user interaction, and so engaging and utilising commenting systems. Better ways of indexing
and searching through ‘tagging’ content with collections of keywords, and syndicating the
information to aide access through mobile devices (e.g. RSS) and for community driven
opportunities (e.g. Digg).
Cultural organisations can react to social networks by discovering and exploring these
online networks, and crossing boundaries and going beyond borders through
internationlisation. Explore and be aware of emerging ways to share information. Web 2.0
tools include important community-building elements which are exploited heavily by
business and specifically brand managers. These organisations are constantly concerned
about managing their brand online, and this approach could be appealing for cultural
observatories and information providers who can mimic the activities of professional brand
managers.
Three things to start today:
• Pick 3-4 industry blogs (see examples at blogs.culture.info).
• Identify people or a person who can lead an exploration for the resources and tools that will
be a ‘best fit’. Who can dedicate the time required on an on-going basis to create and
maintain conversation? Where can the experts be found (and how to join them?).
• Focus on how knowledge can be shared and select manageable tools as part of a continual
process involving exploration, subscribing to existing content, active collaboration and
evaluation, continual improvements and can be measured and refined by the level of
engagement and interaction.
Presented by Michael Roach 11/12/2008 mike@firsitinerval.com mike@euclid.com