It’s a shades-of-grey thing, not a black-and-white thing, surely?
My specific suggestion was that dual publishing (in my instance, to Medium) can be supported without adversely affecting SEO, by having a canonical URL - and that’s best of both worlds.
The approaches to this need to be pragmatic based on the specifics of the problem, IMO. If it’s easier for your institution to publish event data on FB then - provided you’ve done it with a long, sane look at what might happen if they further close their walled garden or if people (like me) who dislike / don’t use Facebook want to see an event and can’t - then cool, go nuts. If you can figure out how to dual publish without kicking your SEO, even better. As Richard says, it’s not “ditch the org website, let’s just do this stuff on Facebook” - it should be a realistic and nuanced approach which fits your organisational strategy. I mean, I know we’re all POST DIGITAL now and don’t have digital strategies, but this is the sort of place where they’re quite useful ;-)
I suspect some archivists will be round to set my house on fire any second, but I personally don’t see an issue with losing data behind closed walls provided it isn’t “core” institutional data, and as long as the organisation in question has taken the decision with eyes open. For me, object / object narrative content IS core data - so orgs who have published solely on Google Cultural Institute without any kind of “what if” plan are asking for trouble.
Can we / will we / should we ever have some kind of all-access platform that ticks all our lovely heritage boxes for longevity, access, archiving? Gawd, no, we’d make the same mistake we’ve always made in the past of spending a fortune on something lumbering and then forgetting all about the important bit: marketing it….
Should we be ticking schema.org boxes, looking for SEO improvements, making sure our OG tags are working as they should? Hell yes.
Will museum websites likely see less traffic as Google My Business and AMP eats up visitor data? Yes, of course. Does it actually matter? No, not really - it’s better for a visitor to get to opening times / prices / location straightaway and actually COME to your organisation than have to faff about on your org website trying to find that stuff, right…? Or are we still so tied to web analytics rather than measures of satisfaction that this makes us twitch in an uncomfortable way…?
ta
Mike
_____________
Mike Ellis
Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency
http://thirty8.co.uk
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On 5 Jan 2018, 11:34 +0000, Richard Light <[log in to unmask]>, wrote:
> Jon,
> I don't think it's a question of choosing between "monolithic websites" and wholesale adoption of e.g. Facebook. Most current sites will include calls to external services (e.g. Google Analytics). As you mention, Facebook has an API, which allows both writing and reading of content, so it should be possible to store data locally and 'inject' it into the Facebook environment.
> The problem with using any external service is that you don't get to set the rules of engagement, and also these rules are liable to change over time in ways you might not like (e.g. the original Facebook API is now replaced by the Graph API [1]). However, this is equally true of public-spirited initiatives like the RES, which looks for and indexes specific RDF classes and properties, and requires statements about licensing of the submitted data. There is a cost to participating. The low level of take-up of projects like Europeana [2] suggests that most museums either don't see the benefits of contributing, or find that the technical challenges of doing so are beyond their capabilities or budget.
> If we are talking about developing some sort of digital public space, there is a discussion to be had about what exactly that should consist of, and what its purpose should be. Are we still fixated on the 'compendious index' concept [3], or should we be creating something which is useful to us (museums), or something which includes museum objects but only as part of an even more ambitious cultural heritage/history resource?
> Like other respondents, I would be happy to talk about this in more detail.
> Best wishes,
> Richard
> [1] https://www.programmableweb.com/api/facebook
> [2] 'the software I know most about' has a report option to export to Culture Grid and hence to Europeana; my guess is that less than 1% of users have actually taken advantage of this option
> [3] http://bit.ly/2CKBvDm
>
> On 04/01/2018 18:20, Richard Leeming wrote:
> > Hi Jon,
> >
> > This is a subject close to my heart - one of the main drivers behind the Research and Education Space which I worked on for the BBC was to create a digital public space (and as I write this I see you’ve just used those words in your reply to Andrew Larking …) to provide a public service based counterweight to the dominance of the US commercial providers …
> >
> > We all know what’s happened to that …
> >
> > I have lots of the reports on the DPS if you want me to throw them at you, and some thoughts about RES and the DPS which are partly informed by no longer working there ...
> >
> > Richard Leeming
> > Digital Consultancy, Strategy and Delivery
> > Tel: 07590 803795
> > Skype: richardmleeming
> >
> > www.leeming.info
> >
> > > On 4 Jan 2018, at 17:24, Jon Pratty <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > >
> > > Happy New Year!
> > >
> > > I’m currently writing some text about a potential gap in public sector digital strategy, questioning what I see as increasingly successful but increasingly commercialised and packaged social media platforms, apparently dominating our lives and our devices. In GLAMs we’ve enthusiastically adopted many of these, from the early days of Del.icio.us through Flickr and Vine and now to Storify.
> > >
> > > Jo Fell recently posted a useful MCG query about the closure of Storify and what to do next, and other list members came up with some alternatives; but Mike Ellis came up with the obvious long-term, relatively nuke-proof intervention. He suggested, as GLAMs, we could and maybe should be setting up local hosting as a long-term legacy measure. (It’s the Battlestar Galactica option, if you are a sci-fi fan!)
> > >
> > > But this is not just about social media apps and tools. More importantly, Facebook is spawning ever-larger audiences within their closed content network, at the same time as building giant income streams and – maybe – locking those audiences into the platform. What are the consequences for cultural heritage organisations, with long-standing values around scholarship, archive policy and educational connectivity in this context?
> > >
> > > Clearly we may well want to use event listings on FB and to trail shows and content; but does the apparently unstoppable tide of people moving from the old vanilla web to the world of Snapchat, Pinterest and FB mean that monolithic websites are now endangered?
> > >
> > > I would like to hear from people working at funder and stakeholder level, and from arts and heritage organisations who might now be considering the need to develop digital forms that fit within the Facebook environment. WikiMedia is an obvious example of a more benign mass environment, so are you considering that, too?
> > >
> > > Is the only alternative to stay ‘outside’ that FB environment and risk isolation from mass audiences? Where does investing in Linked Open Data fit into this? Is LoD compatible with FB APIs?
> > >
> > > All pointers and research tips appreciated…
> > >
> > > Jon
> > >
> > >
> > > Jon Pratty, FRSA
> > > [log in to unmask]
> > > University of Sussex
> > > 07739287392
> > > @jon_pratty
> > > https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-pratty-0855074/
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Sent from Mail for Windows 10
> > >
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> --
> Richard Light
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