I have to say that I’m a huge fan of the National Gallery’s Grand Tour campaign. In order to generate interest in their collection, they have placed full size reproductions of some of the great works of art that they hold on walls all around Soho. It’s being done in conjunction with HP so obviously has a technological angle, in this case an interactive map showing all the locations, and a group on flickr where anyone can post their own pictures.

I have to say that these pictures have made walking to work due to Tube closures a pleasure, but (as with most things) I can’t help thinking that they could have taken it one step further. Whilst the interactive map allows me to email it to a friend or print it off, for some reason I am not able to put the map on my own blog or site. Or even to add to it in anyway.

Whilst I understand that they want to drive people to their own site, I can’t help thinking that they have missed an opportunity to turn this into a true community project; they also could have hosted the project on the main National Gallery site, rather than build an entirely new one, and built up inbound links along the way.

The Grand Tour is obviously about getting people involved who wouldn’t normally take an interest in art; if they could have built some pretty standard Web 2.0 functionality into the project, such as allowing people to share the map, with a YouTube style widget, or even comment and add photos to the main map, it could have been a real social campaign.

I’ve started to use Google’s My Maps functionality to create a social version of the map – it’s quite slow work, so if anyone wants to help me out (or knows of someone who has done this already) please let me know. Even so, I love the Grand Tour and hope that it runs & runs.

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