It’s said that a week is a long time in politics. Right now, in the few days after of a General Election, that’s even more the case. What does the result mean for the UK’s cultural heritage sector? I haven’t a clue. However, it was good to be reminded recently of policy of the re-introduction of free museum entry for the national museums (implemented in 2001). Even with big spending cuts apparently on the horizon, I can’t see this policy being reversed any time soon – and for that, we should be thankful.

Meanwhile, lets have a quick review of the week in cultural heritage.

Blog post of the week goes to Ian Edelman, who has written a review of the introduction of a ‘reviews’ function for museums on the Hampshire County Council website, titled What if they say something bad about us?.

I won’t bother to repeat Ian’s findings here – you can go and read the blog post for yourself – but it did get me thinking about other places in which you can read and post reviews of museums.

One key destination where you can find information about museums, including reviews, is of course Google. They’ve been steadily evolving their search engine, so that searches for museums and other attractions no longer just return a list of links to external web pages, but instead often include a link to Google’s own web page for that destination. These pages started out as part of a ‘Local Business’ search option, but have since been renamed “Place Pages” and feature prominently in regular Google searches, as well as on their Maps search and on searches from a mobile phone.

Whilst Google Place Pages are managed by Google, you can ‘claim your business’ (via a few different means, such a postcard that’s physically posted to you), which gives you a certain amount of control over the page, including the ability to add extra contact details and a short description.

More significant though is that Google Place pages include reviews. These are aggregated from sites such as Qype and TripAdvisor, as well including those posted directly to the page. Each review is associated with a star rating (out of five), which are used to calculate an average. Google’s magic software even automatically picks out a few key ‘themes’ from the reviews in a section called ‘what people are saying about’ – for example, the British Museum’s page picks out ‘collection’, ‘food’ and ‘setting’, each of which get a percentage-based ‘positive’ score.

I thought I’d do a quick review of these pages for the UK’s top national museums. You can see the results in a simple Google Spreadsheet. The good news is that all of the museums I looked at had an average score of either 4 or 4.5 stars out of 5. There were also over 1931 reviews, with four museums having over 200 each. Finally, there are some common themes which the reviews touch upon, such as the ‘collection’, ‘food’ and ‘service’. To get the most out of these reviews, however, you’ll have to read through them individually to get a sense of people’s visit experiences.

As well as the reviews, Google’s Place Pages also support ‘user content’ in the form of photos, videos and relevant web pages/blog posts. Google have also started to offer to take panoramic photos within certain select locations via its Business Photos free service, currently only available in a few cities in the US, Japan and Australia. It sounds to me almost to be a re-run of the dot-com era boom for ’360 degree photo walkthrough’. (I wonder how many museums still have these available online?)

All of this activity points towards a race amongst the big US media companies to become ‘the’ destination and source for geographical and business information. In this race, if Google is the incumbent (who is rapidly trying to add ‘social’ features in order to remain relevant), the the up-starts are Gowalla and Foursquare.

I’ve only experienced Gowalla, but I believe that Foursquare provides a similar service. Both use apps installable on mobile phones to allow people to ‘check in’ to locations and attractions that they visit, with ‘leaderboards’ and ‘badges’ to reward regular check-ins. Whilst both are ostensibly game-like, they clearly also hold huge value as socially-driven databases of places to go and visit. Personally speaking, I’ve found Gowalla’s photo feature to be the most compelling. Each day, I walk through the Winter Garden in Sheffield, part of the Millennium Galleries. It’s a beautiful spot – a kind of miniature Kew Gardens – and so I’ve taken to the habit of capturing a new photo each day, which then gets virtually ‘dropped’ in the spot, for others to discover (see the photos). You might think that this isn’t that different to Flickr, or other existing services, but something about the located-ness of it makes it somehow more interesting and immediate.

Museums are well-represented on Gowalla – take a look at the British Museum spot, for instance – but I’m not sure yet what the opportunities for museums to directly interact with it are. (Given that Gowalla hasn’t announced a business or revenue model yet, I guess it’s still early days).

If there’s a conclusion to all this, it’s that users are interacting with, reviewing, and sharing content about museums in ever-newer destinations. Museums would do well to take note of these destinations, to interact where there is the opportunity to do so, and to monitor and read the reviews at the very least.

However, I also offer a brief cautionary note. Whilst the fact that these destination pages offer less control to museums and business owners isn’t new (this is the way that the web works), a bigger potential issue is that these destinations all offer ‘generic’ user experiences, whereas museums themselves can offer more bespoke, tailored user experiences. There’s a trade-off here between the power of the big media brands to achieve audiences and scale, and the ability of the museums to do something special and unique. I suspect the answer is that we’ll need both, but the question of where to spend resources is never far away.

If Google were to announce that it was going to photograph museum collections and create a page-per-object connected to its Place Pages (which isn’t unfeasible) – would you accept?

This week started strongly with Follow a Museum day. Jim wrote last week about putting it together and I guess everybody tweeting for a museum will agree it was a success. According to the comments most participating museums had between 4 and 6 times more new followers than on an average day.

Apart from the new followers, I am most happy with the variety of ways in which museums around the globe are engaging with their audiences. It’s inspiring to see what they do and the effects it has for them.

Also this week, Google announced it was stopping support for IE 6, starting with Google Docs. This is a good development, I think, as this old browser makes many of our online projects so much more difficult and expensive. It is said that making your online project IE 6 compatible can eat away up to 10% of your development budget. Imagine what we could do with this extra money…

The Museum Global Ranking 2009 was presented this week. Steadily on top: the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their online presence sits at the top of a survey of some 700 other museums.

I’m not really sure it’s a new thing, but the fourth thing that struck my eye is Europeana Labs. The team behind Europeana will make big steps towards making their software open source this year. This will help all heritage institutions to build upon their work on the semantic web.

The Europeana portal will contain some 10 million items by the end of the year, which makes it probably the biggest collection of European cultural heritage.

Finally, today we celebrate Facebook’s sixth birthday. Congratulations Facebook! The social network has changed the world, in a way. People find jobs, get fired, propose and unfriend, all online.

Cultural institutions also have discovered the platform. ‘Follow a Museum’ Jim is writing a series of blogposts on Facebook and a museum’s presence there. Maybe one day soon we’ll have a “Become fan of a museum” day too.

(NB. What most struck my eye this week had nothing to do with cultural heritage online. It was the biggest self-portrait ever. A must see!)