Monday, March 28, 2011

Survey of online genealogical resources

A researcher is doing a study of online genealogical resources and how
useful they are.

If you would like to participate, please go Survey of use of genealogical resources

The findings from this study will help librarians and archivists provide
materials and resources to better serve family history researchers.

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Irish records available on line

News: "The Irish Archives Resource is new website which will, for the first time in Ireland, enable catalogues of Ireland's archival collections to be searched online. The website includes records of current and defunct government and local government agencies, individuals, landed estates, clubs, societies, trade unions, religious organisations, cultural and political organisations etc.

Speaking about the website, Brian McGee, archivist at the Cork City and County Archives said, “This website is an important step in making Ireland's unique records more widely available in Ireland and internationally. The success of the site depends on its use by archivists and other contributors. We would like to see as many people using the site as possible and hope to have collections from up to 30 repositories featured on the site by the close of 2011”."

Monday, March 07, 2011

Carnival of Genealogy: Women's history


This month's Carnival of Genealogy has the theme of Women's History, and I made a contribution with a potted biography of Agnes Green, a pioneering teacher in New South Wales, who seems to have had a remarkably tough life. She had three husbands, one of whom she married twice, and both the others died of unnatural causes. You can find her story on our other family history blog at Agnes Green – education pioneer | Hayes & Greene family history.

The difference between a Blog Carnival and a Synchroblog seems to be that while in a synchroblog you can surf from post to post, because each post has links to all the others, in a Blog Carnival you have to go back to the "home" site to see the full list of posts, so here it is: :: C R E A T I V E G E N E ::: Carnival of Genealogy, 103rd Edition:
In keeping with March being Women's History Month we are honoring the women in our families and our communities with remembrances in words and pictures. Join us and meet the women we most want to honor and remember. You'll get to know trail blazers, salt of the earth types, and ordinary women who've touched our lives in extraordinary ways.

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

MyBlogLog closing - Yahoo's death wish?

I received the following e-mail from Yahoo!

We will officially discontinue Yahoo! MyBlogLog effective May 24, 2011. Your agreement with Yahoo!, to the extent that it applies to the Yahoo! MyBlogLog, will terminate on May 24, 2011.


And if you go to the site there is now a notice that says

MyBlogLog will no longer be in service from 24 May 2011. We recommend Yahoo! Pulse as a service for you to see all your social updates from your favorite networks in one place.

With Yahoo! Pulse, you can create your own identity on Yahoo! and you can easily connect and engage with the people, content, and applications that matter to you, wherever you are on Yahoo!


But I don't want yet another service to see all my social updates from my favourite netowks in one place. I've already got Google Buzz and Plaxo Pulse (Yahoo! couldn't even think of an original name) and anyway, who's to say that in six months or a year Yahoo! won't announce that they are closing Pulse, as they've already closed Webrings, Geocities, Yahoo360, and now MyBlogLog?

And will their Pulse show who has visited my blog so I can visit theirs?

They are closing a useful service and replacing it with a useless one that duplicates what a dozen others are doing. I don't need yet another "one place". One "one place" is enough, two is a duplication, and Yahoo Pulse is the redundant department of redundancy department.

Yahoo! clearly has a death wish.

The other social blogrolling service, BlogCatalog, became quite unusable, with greatly reduced functionality, about 5-6 months ago, so that's the end of that. I wonder if it's a sign that blogging itself is in decline?

Yahoo! has a long history of taking over useful online services and then abandoning them. First it was Webring, then Geocities, and now MyBlogLog. That means that the last useful service they maintain is their listserver, Yahoogroups. It's also something they took over from someone else, an outfit called e-Groups. If they abandon that, there'll be nothing left that will make it worth remaining a member of Yahoo!