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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
popularity terms, but its popularity is always brief as the turnover of content is so high
because so many posts are being made all the time. Once its popularity has expired
another post takes its place. The result on our logs is a short lived spike of referrals
from somewhere like MySpace and it is very difficult to trace exactly what the image
was, or even to find the original post unless you manage to catch the spike as it is
happening.
The popularity that an individual post can achieve is due partly to an increase in the
quality of blogging. It has gained credibility in the mainstream as a form of media in
its own right, with its own stars and professional bloggers. This leads to a higher
quality and popularity of blogging overall which is helping the number of relevant
referrals to sites like the 24 Hour Museum via hijacks. This in turn makes the
argument for better-tagged content as, alongside search engines, it will be bloggers
who will increasingly have a role to play in helping people to find relevant cultural
content that is online.
Like the National Museums Liverpool, the 24 Hour Museum site is well optimized
in its own right, which is why our content is being found by bloggers. This
optimization is grounded in the frequency of our publishing and the use of RSS feeds
to get our stories out into the Web very effectively.
So why have things changed in the last few years? Why are more people who
hijack these images using them in context? Well, it is a result of a number of different
things; the 24 Hour Museum site has become more popular and hence is better
optimized (visitor numbers have risen from 83 000 in January 2003 to over one
million per month in January 2007); there are a lot more people who are blogging; and
crucially, people are getting better at searching. It is also important to note that this is
not something that is happening exclusively to the 24 Hour Museum site, the
percentage of referrals from Google image search is similar on other big image rich
sites like the UK’s Natural History Museum.
But is all this a good thing? The view at Culture24 is definitely yes. It is an example
of people appropriating an aspect of culture in personal ways that mean something to
them, a sign of engagement. It is also a sign that search engines can see these images
and that means people are finding them and they are then popping up on blogs and
social networks like Myspace. But it is still problematic for a lot of organizations as it
challenges the boundaries of their institution, their curatorial control and their sense
of the authority of their data. It necessitates the need to be open to the idea that
knowledge comes from different places and to accept that people may want to use
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