To Ramp Up Its Web Site, MoMA Loosens Up.

Five years is not a long time, in some things. But in dog years and especially in Web years, it can be a stretch. So when the Museum of Modern Art began working in late 2007 to renovate its Web site substantially for the first time since 2002, it knew that it wouldn't be just updating a few pieces -- it would be entering a whole new era. The era is one in which blogs, photo sharing, social networking, bookmarking and many other ways of creating art-loving online communities have become a much more important part of museum Web sites, led by places like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (walkerart.org), the Brooklyn Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is so user-friendly that its site (imamuseum.org) contains a dashboard-like display with up-to-date information, like the size of the museum's endowment, its daily energy use and the average time people spend looking at its Web pages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]