Announcing a new initiative: GeneaBloggersTRIBE.com - GeneaBloggers

Is this good news? I'm not so sure. Announcing a new initiative: GeneaBloggersTRIBE.com - GeneaBloggers:

Announcing a new initiative benefiting genealogy consumers and content providers alike, GeneaBloggers.com and GeneaBloggersTRIBE.com have agreed to streamline features to meet consumer expectations and provide blogger support. Thomas MacEntee will continue working to assure great deals for the wider genealogy community via the GeneaBloggers.com site. A team of dedicated bloggers will expand support for family history bloggers under the new domain GeneaBloggersTRIBE.com.

I'm not sure that I'd like to be called a "genealogy consumer" or a "genealogy content provider". I'm just interested in genealogy and family history and I like communicating with others who are interested, and especially others who are interested in the same families. does that make me a "content provider" of the information I give to them, and a "consumer" of the information that they make available to me, and vice versa? I rather hope not. Those terms sound rather disparaging to me. But at least the article explains why I haven't heard anything about the Carnival of Genealogy for a long time, even if it doesn't explain much else.

Back in the day, the joy of online genealogy research was peer-to-peer communication between genealogy researchers.  "Content Providers" and "Consumers" make me want to puke.

Can you use Pinterest for Genealogy?

I forget why I joined Pinterest -- probably because a friend or family member invited me to do so. I've used it very little, and have never really understood how it works or what it is supposed to do. So I welcomed this article, which is the clearest and most lucid explanation of how it is supposed to work that I have ever seen. Perhaps Pinterest could include it on their site for bewildered newcomers. If, like me, you joined Pinterest without really knowing what it was about, it's worth reading, whether you are into genealogy or not. Can you use Pinterest for Genealogy?:

The real use of Pinterest is that each image is associated with its website of origin. So if you are the type of person that remembers things visually, you can use the pins or individual images as reminders of the content of the original websites. It is also possible to do “research” on Pinterest on a given topic. If you search for a particular topic, the results will show all of the pins relating to that topic. Each of the images is really a link to the website where the image originated, so by clicking on the images you can effectively go directly to that website. In this way, Pinterest becomes just another way of organizing and finding content on the Internet.

If you need a place to store genealogically related websites you encounter on the Internet, you can pin an image from the site and then you will have a visual reminder of the site on your Pinterest board. This may ultimately be more useful for finding content, especially if you are a person who thinks visually. Also, if you run across a photo of family members on the Internet, you can pin the image and not only capture the image, but also a link to the website where you found the image.

From that I would conclude that Pinterest is a kind of visual blog, in the original sense of blog, as a web log, a place where you make a list of web sites you have visited and would like to have a record of so you can visit them again.

I have a blog that I use mainly for that original blogging purpose, Simple Links, and I find it quicker and easier to use than Pinterest.

I have several other blogs, which I use for different purposes rather than as simple web logs -- a couple for observations on the world around me, ideas I want to share and discuss with friends, and also genealogy and family history, where I write up some of our research and discoveries for other family members to read.

I have two family history blogs. There is this one, which, like the Simple Links one, does more or less fulfil the original purpose of a web log -- it is mainly links to web sites that I find interesting or useful for genealogical and historical research, like this article, for example. I publicise this blog a bit more than the Simple Links one because I think that some of the links that interest me may be of interest to other genealogists too.

The second blog, Hayes and Greene Family History, is mainly a sort of research log, recording things we have found and problems we have encountered in the course of our family history research. They are things we like to share with other people, because other family members may be interested in research findings, and others may be able to help with some of the queries. But none of these things seems to be served very well by Pinterest. If I want a log of web sites visited that I may want to visit again, I find my Simple Links blog works better. If it is specifically genealogy web sites I want to record, then I use this blog. But I find Pinterest rather confusing and more complicated to use. Other people's minds may work in that way, but mine doesn't seem to, so I look at Pinterest maybe about once in three months, if that.

If I want a visual record of a web page with some of its content, including pictures, with a link back to the original; site, I find Evernote much better. That still works even if the original web site has disappeared -- you can clip whole artlcles, or even pages, to Evernote.

But if you want to know what Pinterest is supposed to do, this article is pretty good.

Technorati verification

It seems that Technorati had lost this blog's RSS feed, so am attempting to reapply it:

Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the blog by looking for a unique code. Please put the following short code 527CQC975QC5 within a new blog post and publish it. This code must appear in the published post and it must also appear in your corresponding RSS feed once published. 

I wonder if that will work 
 

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!

More on Posterous, Tumblr and Amplify

For a couple of months now I've been trying out Posterous and Tumblr,and was recently reminded that I had tried something on Amplify a year ago, but forgotten that I belonged to it, so I had another look at that too.

I can't say that I'm fully au fait with any of them yet, and I certainly haven't discovered how to use all their features. I'm quite unqualified to write a manual on how they should be used. So why am I writing about them here?

I'm writing this because I suspect that there are a lot of people like me who are not fundies about this stuff, and yet would like to be able to use it and know what it is good for.

I've found that some things are easier than others, and things that are easy in some programs are more difficult in others.

In general, I've found Tumblr is good for gathering, and Posterous for scattering.

I use Tumblr mainly as a kind of blog aggregator. It gather stuff from various blogs that I write, and it publishes a summary. I can grab interesting stuff from the web and put it on Tumblr, and it passes that on to Twitter as well. So I say to people, if you want to follow me, follow me on Tumblr rather than Twitter. You can see summaries of my various blog posts, and if any of them look interesting, you can click on them and see the whole thing. Tumblr acts like a published set of journal abstracts -- you can look through it to find which articles might be interesting without having to read the whole thing. To me that makes more sense than an RSS feed of full blog posts, which seems to me to be the surest way to information overload. Tumblr lets you see what's available and pick the stuff you want to read.

Posterous seems to work best the other way round. It lets you input by e-mail, and then disseminate widely from there. Its e-mail input seems to work better than Tumblr, and lets you include pictures, documents, and text in the message body. In Tumblr this is more difficult, but Tumblr picks up stuff from Posterous nicely, including documents (.pdf and several other formats).

I've been using Posterous mainly for family history, and it posts stuff to our family history blog on Wordpress with no problems, as well as passing it on to Tumblr.

Our former bishop sent me a document the other day, and asked me to put it on the web for him. It was called "The responsibility of Orthodoxy in 2011". Well, I put it on a static web page (here, if anyone is curious), but it's not really the kind of material that suits a static web page. I had no hesitation in recommending Posterous to him, as it would be ideal for his purpose. All he needs to do is to e-mail the document as an attachment in .pdf, .rtf or .doc format, with his own comments, and Posterous does the rest. And when he wants to write another document in 2012 or 2013, Posterous handles that too.

Posterous has other things that don't work too well, or at least not for me.

They've just introduced a group feature, and as an experiment I started one just for our family. It works more or less like the regular Posterous, except each member of the group may contribute and it can be a private or public group. Only problem is, I can't read it. It shows a list of posts, but when you try to open any of the posts to read them, nothing happens. There's just a big blank white square on the screen, like this:



I think something is supposed to appear in that blank white area, but it doesn't.

And the same thing happens when you try to grab something off the web to post on Posterous -- a blank white area appears on the screen and a little turning thingy that says "Loading", and that's it. You can go and make a cup of coffee, or a three-course meal, and when you come back it's still "loading". And the one on Amplify seems to have similar problems. But the one on Tumblr works OK, so I'll carry on using that.

Well that's it so far. Posterous is good at one to many. Tumblr is good at many to one. I'm not sure what Amplify is good for yet.

Trying out Tumblr and Posterous

I've been trying out Tumblr and Posterous.

You've probably never heard of them, but they are quick 'n dirty blog hosting sites that let you share stuff with a minimum of fuss and bother.

If you're toying with the idea of starting a family history blog, but don't want to get into all that computer nerd stuff, one of these may be just what you're looking for.

If you frequently e-mail family and friends to share photos, cartoons, urban legends, family news and photos, then try sending the stuff to Posterous or Tumblr instead. No fuss, no bother, and either of them will turn it into a nicely-formatted blog.

I've started using Tumblr for general stuff, and Posterous for family history stuff, just to see how well they work, and I invite you to have a look and see what you think, and perhaps start one of your own. It's as easy as sending an e-mail. You don't have to be a computer nerd to use them, though from what I can see it is mostly my computer nerd friends that have discovered them.

Anyway, if you'd like to look at mine they are at:

For general stuff there's Marginalia on Tumblr.

For family and family history stuff there's Hayes family updates on Posterous.

though there is quite a bit of overlap as I try them out with some of the same things.

I've noticed a few things.

Posterous handles photos a bit better than Tumblr.

If you e-mail a photo to posterous, it makes the subject line the heading, and the body of the e-mail the body of the post. Just make sure to type #ends where you want the text to end, otherwise it might include all sorts of unnecessary details.

Tumblr handles documents better than Posterous.

I posted a pedigree chart to both, and Posterous handles it via Scribd. It's OK, but the Tumblr one looked better on screen and was easier to read.

But check them out for yourself and make up your own mind.

I don't think either is a complete replacement for "proper" blogging sites like blogspot.com and wordpress.com, because they lack several features of those. For example, neither of them seem to support the widgets (or in Blogger-speak, gadgets) that you'll find in the right margin of this blog, with links to things like MyBlogLog, Webrings and the like. I find those useful for surfing particular kinds of blogs, like genealogy blogs, for example, so I'm not planning to abandon this blog, or my Wordpress one which deals more with our own family.

But for quick-fix family updates and sharing your research discoveries, family news and photos, Tumblr and Posterous are ideal.

A fresh start for this blog

I'm revamping this old family history blog, which has been dormant for a couple of years, and turning it into a general family history and genealogy blog. Our personal family history research will still mostly be on our other blog, which is on WordPress, which is better for things like posting family photos.

This blog will be for more general posts on family and local history and genealogy. News, information about resources, family history software, or background interest about places of interest, and especially the areas we are interested in -- southern Africa, the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The blogroll will reflect this, though I'll also be happy to link to any halfway decent genealogy blog that displays the "Recent Viewers" widget from MyBlogLog and/or BlogCatalog.

Reviving this blog

I've been thinking of reviving this blog.

I stopped adding to it about two years ago when Google were making all kinds of changes to the Blogger software, and there were more and more bugs in it. Like a lot of other bloggers, I moved this blog to WordPress, which seemed more stable.

Now the Blogger software is much improved, and for some purposes has some advantages over WordPress, and so it might be worth reviving.

But our main family history blog is still Hayes & Greene family history, so please check that as well.

This blog has a new home

This blog has a new home at http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/.

I have moved the older entries over to there, but the comments entered on the Haloscan comment utility may not have been moved.

I had to move it because every time I tried to read the blog here, I got a "403 forbidden" message, so I could not read either the entries or the comments.

I hope that the new system, called WordPress, proves more reliable than this one.

See you there.

Problem with this blog

All of a sudden, I can no longer read this blog.

It seems that I can add stuff to it, but there is a bug so that I can't read it. It seems that there is a problem with the Blogger software, run by Google.

I can still post stuff, but I can't read what I've posted, which means I also can't read any comments or responses.

If you want to respond to this message, please do so on my WordPress blog, which runs on different, and apparently more reliable software.

If the problem is not fixed soon, I will try to move this blog over to WordPress, but until then, if you are interested in our family history, please try our family history wiki pages at http://hayesgreene.wikispaces.com -- if you join there you can add and edit the family history, leave messages and queries and more.