Musings from the National Genealogical Society Conference

I guess it was only appropriate that I discovered that my professional skill-set was dead while attending a Genealogical convention. I have been developing web pages for my company for the past 10 years and am thoroughly knowledgeable about HTML, Perl and PHP. However, while attending a session titled "Blogs, Wikis & Flikr, Oh My! Sharing and collaborating on the Modern day Web" presented by Jordan Jones (Jordan@GenealogyMedia.com) I quickly realized how completely unaware I am of what has been happening in the real world. I am certain that I was the only person in the room who has never used Facebook, Flickr, a Blog, RSS or Footnote.

I can only remember a fraction of all of the information presented by Jordan, but I did walk away with a personal commitment to get with the times and begin using several of the tools he covered (the URL's are from Jordans handout):

Blogs - if you are reading these words then you know I have fulfilled my first commitment to begin blogging.

Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) - this looks like a great tool for sharing genealogically significant images with my family. It allows you to upload images and "tag" them with Meta information that others can use to search for and locate them. The tools available seem to provide a great deal of flexibility when it comes to deciding who can access and view what you post. It even allows you to provide low resolution images, suitable for sharing on the web but not likely to be downloaded and pirated without your permission.

Footnote (http://www.footnote.com/) – Although this is not a free service, it appears to be a good companion to Flickr. Its focus is on scanned documents, and they apparently have images from the National Archives available.

Delicious.com (http://delicious.com/) - A web tool that allows you to organize and share your favorite web pages. It has links that can be incorporated into your personal web page. It is also a great web based tool that will have a record of all your links even if your PC (and all your favorites) crashes.

Print on Demand - This looks like a really exciting development. There are several companies specializing in printing small quantities of Adobe Acrobat formatted documents - perfect for things like family histories.

• CafePress – http://www.cafepress.com/
• Lulu – http://www.lulu.com/

Mapping - there are some really fascinating capabilities available with Google and Yahoo maps.

• Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/
• Google Maps – http://maps.google.com/
• Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/

Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.com/) - By this point in the presentation I was reduced to writing and underlining the names of sites that looked really interesting... this was one of them. When I got home I looked at the handout and found that this is a great source of information concerning issues of privacy that are important when sharing and collaborating with others on the web.