152 Museum Blogs, 20,000 Posts
May 1st, 2007 by Jim Spadaccini
The museum blogosphere is growing at a furious pace. In the first four months of the year, we saw 57 blogs added to the Museum Blogs directory. We’ve now surpassed 150 blogs and an astounding 20,000 aggregated posts on the site. Just last month, when Seb Chan and myself presented, Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere at the Museums and Web conference in San Francisco there were 139 blogs. Today, about three weeks later 13 more have appeared. Having just delivered the paper last month, it’s hard to believe an update is needed, but here we are.
It seems like it won’t be so easy to get a handle the museum blogosphere in the future. There should be well over 200 blogs by the end of the year, and next year, who knows? Blogging is becoming (as it should) just another way for museums to connect with the public and each other. In the much the same way as developing a museum Website became common-place in mid-90s, we seem to be on the verge of something similar with blogging in the museum world. Perhaps that threshold is passed once we can’t count all the new museum blogs? For now we’re still counting.
I thought it would be nice to welcome these new blogs with a link. As we’ve seen with other museum blogs, there’s a wide variety of approaches here and they are geared for very different audiences. Take a look at the latest additions…
The Exploratorium Explainers
MuseumLab
Tagwerke (Museum fur Kommunikation, Frankfurt in German)
Thinker Blog (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Telling Lives Blog (American History Workshop)
n8 blog (Stichting Museumnacht, Amsterdam in Dutch)
electronic museum
Museums Remixed (AAM 2007 Conference)
eyes + ears
Office of Exhibits Central (Smithsonian Office of Exhibits Central)
Guided By History (Wells Fargo History Museum)
Arriba y Abajo (Workers Museu Maritim, Barcelona in Spanish and Catalan?)
Youth Exploring Science (St. Louis Science Center)
May 1st, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Hi! I contribute to the Exploratorium Explainers blog, and wanted to thank you for listing us! We are very excited about the blog and I personally hope it will become an interesting forum for discussion of exhibits and fun bits. I was working at the reception for the Museums and Web conference at the Exploratorium, and it truly was the most fun event I’ve ever worked at: everyone was really into the museum and playing with exhibits, asking questions and exploring the night away. I should have known: they were all museum workers!
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:39 am
[…] But there are still only 152 blogs listed: http://www.ideum.com/blog/2007/05/01/152-museum-blogs-20000-posts/ […]
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:23 am
Thanks for the shout out. Museum Blogs has been an inspiration to me!
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:40 am
Thanks Jim. Great site (and I’m getting some traffic from you, too..). Would be good to catchup sometime and chew the cud.
May 4th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Thanks for all this work Jim. The original posting on Museumblogs about my Audience Research blog shamed me into reviving it, plus having my intern Mel, to help me out is great.
I was wondering how I can get a feed into your aggregator? I’m still new at this so I can’t even figure out if I’ve actually got a feed on my blog at all! I tried Blogger help but couldn’t find what I needed. Any help welcome…
May 7th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Everyone,
Thanks for all your comments and sorry for the delay in responding. It’s great see so many interesting blogs in our field. You may have noticed we’ve even added a few more since I posted this less than a week ago.
Lynda, Museumblogs should be able to accept your feed. Originally, we could only handle RSS 2.0 but we expanded that recently. The change you submitted will be in place soon.
Jim
May 17th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Before the proximity of the Day the International of the Museums, we sent a warm greeting to you from www.arribayabajo.blogspot.es
This nonofficial of the workers of the Museu Marítim of Barcelona is blog (Spain), eager not to share experiences lived within his center of work, with a vision amused and in ironic and humoristic tone. In the same way, we would like to harness the paper of blogs of museums in Hispanic speech worldwide. He cheers knowledge to us which we are not single and exist similar restlessness in other places, for very distant that these are. Happy Day the International of the Museums