It seems like only days ago that I was writing a post about search engines and social recommendation, and that's because it was only days ago. Since then - decades in internet time - some interesting developments have taken place.

The hype around real-time search, particularly focussed on everyone's favourite micro-blogging service, has certainly caused the major search engines to take note. The power of real-time data, most obviously encapsulated in Twitter's trending topics, seems to prove itself weekly (or, if you like, instantly).

At the core of my previous post was the inclination that, despite the hype, major search engines and services like Twitter have entirely different missions - and they know it. Both the widespread creation of real-time data, and appetite for its consumption, are relatively recent phenomena. If this information is being created, and is valuable, Google will work to index it as part of its mission to organise the world's information. Indexing tweets is one important step towards this, and... hey look they announced it. As did Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. The latter seems to have rushed out a rather confusing solution, the big G is taking its time, and I for one will be watching carefully to see how they roll this out without disrupting their archetypal search results page and carefully honed user experience.

This is the second part of an article looking at the authorial voice and what we can and can't do with it.

Okay, deep breath...

So you're a major cultural institution; you've got fantastic content and you're an authority on it (well, as much as you can be these days).

Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more... er... authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe... and you (the public) believe us.

There’s an interesting post by Nina Simon on her Museum 2.0 blog about how museums can learn from the gaming community about engaging with their community influencers.

Community influencers operate in the social space that surrounds a game and often have more influence with other users than those who have high scores.

If engagement is the key to the Web 2.0 (and Media 2.0) world - and that's what we believe - then what are the implications ? What are the rules of this new world ?

Reviewing our own experience (over twenty years and hundreds of projects) and what we know of the industry at large, we have developed a proposal: four rules for success in the world of Web 2.0 and Media 2.0.

Our four proposed rules are as follows :-

1.

Cogapp has been working with interactive media for twenty years, what have we been doing all this time? What have we been doing for our clients? And what more can we do now? How should we respond as an organisation? And how can we help others to respond?