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)