dbear's blog

NOTE: This was an experiment, meant to test the method, not to produce a citable result. Read the comments.

The other day I was musing about what impact museums are having on the Web and who is 'punching above their weight'?  I began to ask how would we know, and it occured to me to check the relative Alexa rankings of museums (http://www.alexa.com/). This produced a few possible answers and lots of surprises, so I systematically looked through the rankings to find the (c. 200) 'museums' that ranked, by traffic, in the top 500,000 web sites worldwide. I included www.archimuse.com for comparison and amusement (which, if it was a museums, would have ranked 99 among museums).

Thanks so much for your evaluations of MW2009 – if you haven’t completed one, you still can online at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/mw2009.evaluationForm.html. Our preliminary analysis of these is proving immensely useful as always, but we’re always happy to hear more (so respond online even if you filled one out at the meeting but have had additional thoughts since).

You don't always agree ...

Of course the way the conference really works is that people attend and participate. We would like to think that the meeting is designed so that everyone who comes participates; if we count the unconferences, BOF's, blogs and tweats, everyone who wants to certainly does! We suppose, however, that some attendees were lurking, happily, and that's fine too.

Having previously reviewed the venue, staff, food and publications related efforts and costs, in this last blog posting about the conference I’ll discuss a number of miscellaneous issues including the pre-conference events and exhibits that are important components of the overall program. Finally, I'll pose a question we've been noodling, about whether it makes sense to have a "membership" in Museums and the Web.

We invest a huge effort in getting the Museums and the Web conferences documented. As those who have proposed presentations for MW know, everything goes through extensive peer review. Once accepted, we require all our speakers to provide full papers and then we copy edit those papers and put them on-line, on CD-ROM and in print. After the meeting, we follow up by putting slides of talks on-line and providing transcripts or video of some events. The entire process, end-to-end requires a lot of attention and costs a great deal. We think it is worth it and hope you agree.

The conference, like any army, marches on its belly. This year we each ate or drank $177.57 of our registration fees. That included 625 bottles of water at $4.66 each and over 2400 cups of coffee, decaf and tea from hotel urns at $4.32 each (yes, the hotel over-charges for everything). One reason we give out 'free' tickets for Starbucks espresso drinks, is that this is cheaper for us than the hotel coffee.

We take advantage of the clauses that we negotiate to permit us to bring in outside contractors. After all, as you have no doubt noticed, we have no staff. Jennifer and I do the conference year-round, though primarily during the six months leading up to the meeting when we estimate we spend about 50% time on it (eg. 2 people 50% x 6mo = 1 FTE very unevenly distributed and with lots of long days).

I don't know if it was Max Anderson's call for transparency in the opening plenary, curiosity about how sausages are made, or just an effort to make conversation with me assuming it was something I knew about and not wanting to presume whether I might be able to discuss museums as well...but I received lots of questions about what goes into running the conference this year at MW, so I thought I'd explain in a series of posts.

I was a skeptic about twittering, seeing it as useless chatter, until in the weeks leading up to this year's conference, I found I was becoming a regular reader of twitter feeds tagged #MW2009 because they were producing one or two url's a day that were useful references.

if you'd like to save money on your trip to MW2009 we've set up a thread for people who are looking for roommates, in the MW discussions.