Alan E. Mann, AG

alan.familyhistory@gmail.com                                                            Accredited Genealogist

Fresno County Genealogical Society 2008 Annual Seminar     www.alanmann.com/articles           

Saturday, 18 October 2008                                                                                    11:30-12:30 am

                                 

 

The Bluster About Blogging

What is blogging and what does it have to do with family history and genealogy? This session looks at what blogging is, what is happening in genealogy blogging, how it can help you in your family history research, and how to effectively use blogs.

 

 

What is a blog and what is blogging?

A Blog “is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order… blogging has quickly emerged as a popular and important means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world. (Wikipedia). For a more complete history and background on blogging, see the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging.

 

Generally, blogs contain most of all of the following parts:

  • Title, the main title, or headline, of the message being left, called a post. The word post comes from the old bulletin board concept, that a message is posted on the bulletin board for all to see.*
  • Body, main content of the post.
  • Permalink, the internet address, or URL, of the complete post.
  • Post Date, date and time the post was put up on the blog.
  • Comments left by others who have seen the post and wanted to leave a comment.
  • Categories (or tags) - subjects that the entry discusses
  • Trackback and/or pingback - links to other blogs or websites that mention this post.
  • Blogroll – a list of blogs that the author of the currently displayed blog reads regularly. When you find a blog you find valuable, this is a good source of other blogs your might find interesting.

 

Blogging is the writing of an entry or post in a blog. There are a few unique terms describing blogs. For example, a moblog is a blog created on a mobile device such as a phone or PDA; a vlog is a blog with video content; a photoblog is a blog whose content is almost entirely images. There are other terms used which may unfamiliar to you. If so, just type the word at http://en.wikipedia.com to get an explanation.

 

To start a blog, an individual selects an internet site to host (store) his/her blog, and selects the software to author the content of the blog. There are a number of websites that offer free blog site storage and free software to create the blog posts. There are also websites that charge a small fee for storage (presumably they also offer some small service or capability that you can’t get from the free ones), and there is software that is either free, expandable for a fee, or available for a one-time or periodic fee.

 

Major software includes MovableType and WordPress, which just to confuse things are also blog hosts.  Major blog hosts include blogger, livejournal, TypePad, and Xanga. For a comparison of blog software, see the Blog Software Comparison at www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm (out of date, but a good start).

 

There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of blogs. The content of all blogs as a whole is called the Blogosphere.

 

 

Genealogy blogging

There is a lot of genealogy blogging going on. Some talk about their research experiences, some try to pass on tips and research techniques, others pass along news and current happenings in the community, a few are devoted to specific products or projects, while yet others try to foster a discussion about concepts, plans, needs, or techniques. Here are a few sample blogs:

 

A fairly recent thing to genealogists is vlogs (video blogs).

 

You can search the blogosphere for a term or phrase. This will return blog postings that mention the word or phrase you input. A few also offer the ability to search for blogs devoted to the word you enter into the search box. Blog search tools include:

      http://genblogs.worldvitalrecords.com/ and   http://randysmusings.blogspot.com.

An interesting concept is an annotated or RSS-feed from a blogroll, as seen at http://ancestories1.blogspot.com/.

 

Tagging is an important concept in blogging. Few blogs actually allow tags, which leads to social tagging with products like del.icio.us and digg. Tagging is the idea of adding a topic or subject category to postings. One could think of it as an attempt to catalog the blogosphere. In essence, a tag is metadata. The shortcoming of tagging is that people may tag things without being consistent. For example, some might tag this article under genealogy, while others might tag it under family history. A single article can have multiple tags, so this article could be tagged under genealogy, family history, blogging, RSS, and how to.

 

The advantage of tagging, is that if you can search by tags, you weed out the incidental use of a term and get results that are actually about that subject. For example, a search for genealogy in a blog search will return an article that talks about the genealogy of scientific theory, while a tag search would not because the posting on scientific theory would not be tagged under genealogy just for the incidental use of the term.

 

 

How a genealogy blog can help you

A great deal of the success of genealogy and family history in the past ten years has come from the growth of sharing information via email and websites.  For genealogists, blogging is a way of sharing knowledge and cooperating together for mutual benefit. A genealogy blog can inform us about the latest happenings, suggest new ways that we might use existing records, help us learn how to use a web site more effectively, put us in touch with others with common interests, or inform us about records or websites we didn’t know existed. There are technical, regional, or even ethnic genealogical blogs.

           

Blogging is a great way to contribute to the pool of shared meaning—information which is available to all. Even if you don’t choose to be a blogger, you can benefit from the content that others have created.

 

 

Using blogs effectively

Rounded Rectangle: “RSS is great. No, I'll go further than that. RSS, as a representation of an idea, is perhaps the single most influential cultural shift of the post-2001 technical and business community. RSS is the embodiment of the notion of sharing and syndication.” (DeWitt Clinton’s unto.net)While blogs can bring you some useful information when you take the time to go searching for something, effective use of blogs takes advantage of a technology called RSS.  RSS “is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs.” (from Wikipedia).  Practically speaking, when applied to blogs, RSS is a technology that allows any blog reader to mark that which has already been read, and to automatically deliver any new content or any new content that meets certain criteria. A blog, website, or search that is RSS-enabled is called an RSS feed.

 

Thus, we can monitor a blog that we think is interesting, or we can have a subscribed search that notifies us when any new results for a specific search come. Thus, one can perform a search with a blog search or web search engine, look at the results, then subscribe via RSS to that search. The user then is automatically notified when a new search result is found. For example, I use Google to search for “Daniel S. Corley” and check each of the search results. I then subscribe to the a search for “Daniel S. Corley.” Google’s RSS feed will then automatically notify me whenever Google finds another web site with that name on it.

 

 

Text Box: Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites of interest for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." An aggregator is able to subscribe to a feed, check for new content at user-determined intervals, and retrieve the content. The content is sometimes described as being "pulled" to the subscriber, as opposed to "pushed" with email or IM. (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/RSS_aggregator) To use RSS effectively, there are a variety of software products call RSS readers or RSS aggregators. These tools allow you to pull the content you want onto a single page, which you check as you want. It keeps track of what you have seen and what you haven’t. Many web sites have a small RSS button to let you know they are configured to work with RSS aggregators. Some aggregators are web-based. You just visit a web site, then select the feeds you want to subscribe to.

 

Some present the blog postings in a list, similar to an email program. Others attempt to put blogs in small boxes on your screen.

 

 

 

Popular examples of these include bloglines, PageFlakes, ProtoPage and NetVibes. Other are software that you install on your computer, like NewsGator, RSSReader, and FeedReader. I personally use NetVibes although I also like BlogLines (easier to subscribe). 

 

Some pages still do not have RSS enabled. Sometimes, we want to be notified of new content on a page which does not have an RSS feed. There are a variety of recent web services which create RSS feeds from any web site, such as Page2RSS or FeedYes.

 

 

 

©Copyright 2006-8 by Alan E. Mann, AG. All rights reserved. Written permission to reproduce all or part of this syllabus material in any format, including photocopying, data retrieval, or the Internet, must be secured in advance   from the copyright holder.