Web 2.0 and Genealogy Research--My Favorites!

Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt

Week #14: Talk about the different types of technology you use in your genealogy research. Whether it’s a new search engine, a special application, or anything else “2.0,” let readers know what you’re working with, and how it’s working for you.

Flickr--yes, this is a photo sharing site, but I couldn't live without it! I have family and friends in two continents, six states and this the main way I share photos with them. I upload photos here more than facebook. I especially like the "leave a comment" feature that I use to "tag" and identify individuals in group photograhs. My relatives can comment on the photographs and assist in the identification process or just add their two-cents worth! Here is one photo that my father chimed in on. I have quite a few faces to identify as you can see!

Facebook (fb)

• "Friend" fellow genealogists and keep up with their status updates
• Follow multiple blogs on the fb application, Networked Blogs
• Become of "fan" of genealogy related sites or "join" a group to stay up-date-with your favorite applications/groups/software. Here are just a few groups/pages on fb that I follow:
  
• Geneabloggers--Thanks Thomas MacEntee and gang! They are a wonderful support for both veteran and newbie bloggers. I love the weekly blog post ideas for inspiration!


• Legacy Family Tree--My genealogy software
  
• Clooz--Organizational software that I use. It is an electric filing cabinet that assists you with search and retrieval of important facts that you have found during the ancestor hunt. Clooz shows you the relationship between documents, whereas, genealogical software (i.e., Legacy, Family Tree, etc.) shows the relationship between people.
  
• Facebook Friends of the National Archives



• National Genealogical Society

Twitter

• Post a status message when your blog gets updated. Your followers will be alerted and follow the link to read it. The reverse is also possible as long as the people that you are following do likewise. I was creating the post manually, until I discovered....
  

Tweet Later

• I use this service to automate a Twitter post from my blog when it gets updated. This is easy and there is a tutorial! I don't have to remember to log into Twitter to "advertise" that I updated my blog.


• I also use this service to set up a keyword search. Periodically, Tweet Later will search ALL of the tweets for the specific Key Word(s) that you request. The results will be sent to you in your email inbox (it can get to be a long list depending on what you search on). You can search on "genealogy," specific genealogical organizations or particular people's names. This is a huge time saver because you don't have to constantly stay on Twitter to monitor status posts for something you are interested in. Also, you will learn about posts of people that you may not be currently be following (but you may decide to follow them after you discover that they are posting information on a topic that interests you!). Tutorial is here.

TweetDeck

• I use this application to organize the Twitter people that I am following. Not everyone that I follow has posts on genealogy, so I set up groups in Tweet Deck. One group is titled, "genealogy." I have another group of "close friends" another on "librarians." This way, my twitter posts are organized according to subject (more or less). This is a much more efficient way to read Twitter than by logging into the Internet version of Twitter.



• TweetDeck has now integrated with FaceBook and one of your groups is automatically your Facebook friends. It is so nice to be able to scan that column for the latest status posts from your fb friends. You don't have to login to fb either!

Ancestry.com--I have been a full subscriber for many years and I couldn't live without it!

Footnote.com--Great new site and I love the social networking aspect! A big bonus...they are uploading Texas birth and death certificates and I am saving them just as fast as they appear online! You can create your own pages and link your own uploaded information with Footnote content. See this page on my great-great grandfather.

iGoogle (How I organize my RSS feeds)

• The only thing I will say about this fabulous application is to read an earlier post that I created on this application!

Well, I could go on a bit more, but since this is my first blog post in about 6-weeks, I'll call it a night and publish this entry!!!

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!

Blogs Everywhere! Keeping up with Them All...

Since I made my New Year's Resolution to become more active in the blogging community, I find it increasingly difficult to find the time to read through all the wonderful blogs that are out there! Blogger has a wonderful feature to assist and that is when offered, click on the "Follow Me" button and the person's blog feeds will show up in your dashboard when you log into Blogger.

I love this feature because it is easy to do and a very visible way to monitor who is reading your blog!

I also do one more thing, but it may seem redundant to some folks. I am a lover and use of iGoogle. I have used it in my other life, School Library Media Specialist. I like iGoogle because:

• All of your blogs are visible on one page with the latest 3 or more posts visible. You set up the parameters. This is different from a reader because in a reader, you capture all of the blog posts until you read them and/or delete them or mark them as favorites.


• I find that I am too busy to want to see everything that has ever been been published and that if I monitor my iGoogle page daily, I can quickly see at a glance what is "happening."


• If I find a particularly interesting blog post in my iGoogle page, I can click on the blog heading and a new Internet window will launch. I can then browse that blog and go back in their history as long as I want!


• You can personalize each iGoogle tab any way you want with numberous themes. For variety, each tab can have a different theme. You can name the tab anything you prefer.


• You can easily delete RSS feeds, add RSS feeds, and move the RSS feeds around on your page so that your favorites will be at the top of the page.


• There are numerous widgets that you can add for ease; i.e., clock, calendar, things to do list, translator, ping widget to update your status in other social networking sites, etc.

I have my iGoogle page set as my Homepage. The only faults that I see:

• It does tend to take a few minutes to load, especially if you have a lot of feeds on the page/tab.


• Since this is not a Reader, the set number of posts keeps updating and the oldest ones "drop off" iGoogle. If you really want to capture EVERY post from EVERY blog, then this would not be the format for you.

Here is the "home" tab from my iGoogle page:



You can see my ping.fm widget so that I can quickly update my "status" (I update to facebook and twitter) from this site. Why would I do that? I work in a busy high school media center (library) and I do not have time to do much "personal" social networking, so I find that if I keep my iGoogle page up at work, I have access to my calendar (which my husband uses and we sync it with our Outlook calendar at home), my "things to do list" my blog postings and my status updater. Also, facebook is blocked at my school, so at a minimum, I can still update my status even if I can't log in! If I come across a neat website or blog or article that I would like to share, I can quickly put it in my "status" and let my friends and colleagues know about it.

Here is my tab where I post my genalogy blogs:

You can see that enlarged the box in one of my feeders (top row, in the middle) and these options give you the ability to quickly share the feed with someone, delete it, or change it so that you can see more blog posts than the default of 3. You can also select the "You might also like" option and Google will try to find you more feeds like the one on your page.

You also have the capability to share the entire tab with someone. This is great if you want someone else to read the same blogs as you; maybe a friend, colleague or genealogy group, etc.

Well, I hope that I have given someone a peek at my attempt at how I organize all of the wonderful information on the World Wide Web and maybe you can use some of the ideas that I have shared with you!