Keeping with Technolgoy (or trying to)!

Well, my blog is supposed to be about genealogy not technology, but I am finding these two interests of mine converging. There is also an overlap with my day job, school libray media specialist! Most often, I learn about new technology from other bloggers. I read their blogs for the content,  but I also look a their layouts, widgets, and basic features that they are using to see if I can apply some to my own blog. I am constantly trying to keep up with technology to pass along techniques to my students, use with my students to better impace their learning or use in my  genealogy "world."

I find that many websites have their own blogs and if I subscribe to their RSS Feeds, I can "hear" about their latest innovations as soon as they advertise them. Ancestry.com has a blog and that is where I learned about the features of My Canvas. I even watched the tutorial last night, having missed the "live version," I was able to catch up in the archives because of a post by Stefanie Condie.

Flickr, the photo sharing site has a blog. So does Twitter. The Footnote.com blog is how I keep up with that site's newest acquisitions. YouTube has also joined in the blogging arena.

My previous post discusses how in the world I keep up with all of these blogs without losing my mind! Put these feeds in your Reader or iGoogle page or you will not be able to keep up!

Most people who will be reading this blog will probably be aware of RSS Feeds, but you may have friends or colleagues who do not understand the possibilities that open up to you when you start to subscribe to these feeds.  If you have a difficult time understanding or explaining the concept to someone else, I find the most helpful tutorials come from a company called Common Craft: Explanations in Plain English. They ingeneously put up "low tech" video tutorials to explain the most technologically advanced concepts and they are so fun to watch! The video on RSS feeds is one of my favorites. Their tutorial on Wikis was one of my first introduction to their videos, but if just type "Common Craft" into the YouTube search engine, you can see all of their video clips. I did watch the one on Twitter, but I found that the blog entry put up by Thomas MacEntee on Facebook Bootcamp for Genea-Bloggers and more was brilliant and more useful for applying it to genealogy.

Lastly, there is one blogger in the technology world that I follow because he focuses on web 2.0 social networking sites. His name is Pete Cashmore and his blog is called Mashable! He describes the site as, "Founded in July 2005, Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Networking news. With more than 5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web."

So, while I am not entering information into Legacy Family Tree, scanning documents for uploading, searching for records on Footnote.com, Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, etc., reading blogs from all my new found genelogical friends, you can find me lurking in the techie world trying to learn what is the next best thing out that will help make my world a bit easier to navigate!