Back in May of 2006, we launched Museum Blogs (www.museumblogs.org) as an experimental site and to “help increase the community’s awareness and authority.” By authority we meant search rankings and Technorati ranking in particular. By aggregating all of the collective feeds the site has created additional links to all the museum blogs in the directory.

When the site launched there were only around 50 museum blogs and now two years later there are nearly 300 in listed in the directory.  In just a few hours, we will exceed 100,000 blog posts, a pretty remarkable development for the museum blogosphere which, by all estimates, was pretty far behind in using blogging technology.  Two years later blogging is common-place among many museums and is seen as just another way to communicate with the public.

On Tuesday morning of this week, I showed a slide illustrating the growth of the museum blogosphere at the Association of Science-Technology Center’s annual conference. When I returned from the conference, I was surprised to find that the slide I had shown was already quite dated. My original slide, which I put together about 10 days ago, showed 211 blogs in Museum Blogs directory–today there are 233. We’ve received more than 20 new submissions to museum blogs in a little over a week.

At the Museums and the Web conference in April, I predicted that we would reach 200 museum blogs by the end of the year. It now appears that we might be closer to 300. The numbers are an indication that blogging in the museum world is becoming mainstream. It’s no longer about starting a blog, but rather using blogging tools to achieve various tasks. We’ve seen blogs that: support exhibits, help organize docents, share the museum Director’s vision, conduct direct marketing, re-publish articles from museum publications, help with professional development, explore specific topics or issues, as well as blogs that are used as simple content management systems inside existing sites.

It is also interesting to note that many institutions now run multiple blogs. While the Walker Art Center always has, the Smithsonian, St. Louis Science Center, Powerhouse Museum, Exploratorium, and many others now have more than one. Apparently blogging is contagious within institutions. Once tried, museums find other ways to use the technology.

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)

Yesterday, Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum and I presented our paper, Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere at the Museums and the Web conference. Following the presentation we had a lunchtime meet up and discussion about the future of museums and blogging. It was nice meet many of the folks beyond the blogs that I’m so familiar with. Here’s a round up of resources and posts from the session.

• Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere (the paper on the MW 2007 site)
• Our presentation in PDF format radicaltrust.pdf (800k)
• Live blogging of the session by Nate Schroeder at the Walker Art Center’s New Media Initiatives Blog.

Following our lunch I was thinking that this will likely be the last time we can easily survey the museum blogosphere since its growth has accelerated so dramatically in recent months. A big part of our presentation focused on the changes we’ve seen just since the December survey! You can see for yourself over at MuseumBlogs where there are now 139 blogs listed. Back in December when we conducted our original survey there were 95. What’s next for the museum blogosphere? Perhaps we can continue that conversation on our various blogs.

(Update:  There’s a discussion underway on the Walker New Media Blog about the session and museum blogging in general. Questacon Online has a post about the session and bloggers meet up and more. There’s also much more about the Museums and the Web Conference at Fresh + New, I’m in Ur Museum Website…, and of course the conference blog has a number of posts about various presentations and events.)

Our paper summarizing the findings from the first museum blog survey is now available on the Museums and the Web 2007 website. Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum and I conducted the survey back in December. For our presentation at the conference in San Francisco, we’ll discuss what these results mean and take another look at museum blogs to see how things have changed even over the last few months. For those of you attending, we’ll also be having a meet up of museum bloggers following the session. See you in San Francisco.