Alan
E. Mann, AG®
alan.familyhistory@gmail.com Accredited Genealogist
Grainger West Stake Family History Seminar www.alanmann.com/articles
Blogs,
Wikis, & Social Networking
Why they’re for Genealogists
Blogs and
Wikis are two types of social media. There are other examples. The basic idea
of social media is in reference to Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing
and discussing information among human beings.[i] Social media are relatively cheap tools that enable anyone (even
private individuals) to publish or access information. The value of social
media is the value of cooperative efforts—that many heads are better than one.
In the idea of cooperative efforts lies the value of social media for
genealogists. Social media promises to reduce the amount of duplication and
increase the amount of cooperation and mutual assistance.
Blogs
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.
Blog aggregation tools
NetVibes (www.netvibes.com) example – www.netvibes.com/familyhistory. ProtoPage (www.protopage.com) example – www.protopage.com/relativelycurious, and iGoogle.
Carnivals
A blog carnival is a
type of blog event.
It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and
is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly.[1]
Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks to
other blog articles on the particular topic.
Carnival posts are generally
collated by the author by soliciting relevant contributions from interested
people. The author collects links to these submissions, edits and annotates
them and publishes the resulting round-up to his or her blog. Many carnivals
have a home page or principal organizer, who lines up guest bloggers to host
each edition. This means that the carnival travels, appearing on a different
blog each time.
Communities of blog readers,
writers, and edition hosts form around specific carnivals. The carnivals
provide an aggregation of recent posts by the community on a given topic, and
the host provides a level of editing and annotation that helps readers find
posts they are interested in. Writers who submit their articles to blog
carnivals are rewarded with traffic… For example, Smile for the Camera at www.shadesofthedeparted.com/2009/01/carnivals-in-town.html.
www.blogcarnival.com/bc/clist.html – list of carnivals. Pick
category history. You can browse or do a search within that category.
Wikis
A wiki is a page or collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses
it to contribute or modify content. Wikis are used to create collaborative
websites, where a community work together to provide meaningful content.
Wikipedia, the world’s largest and most used encyclopedia, is probably the best
known example. However, wiki has been used successfully in the genealogy
community. Dick Eastman started the Encyclopedia of Genealogy at www.eogen.org.
FamilySearch started the Research Wiki at wiki.familysearch.org.
The idea is for everyone to work together to create something that’s freely
available to everyone and made possible by the combined efforts of many.
To
see the efforts to have the genealogy community at large participate in the
Research Wiki, see https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Barn_Raising_on_FamilySearch_Wiki.
The value of a wiki is that anyone can contribute. The combined efforts of
several individuals usually create a better end result than any one individual
could create alone.
Social Bookmarking
There
are a number of sites that attempt to create a community for locating and vetting web sites. These include digg, del.ico.us, furl, connotea,
stumbleupon, and dozens of other sites. There are
many ways to use the power of the community to find and recommend valuable web
sites on any subject. In addition to social bookmarking services, there are
custom toolbars (see www.usefultoolbars.co.uk/index.html and www.familygenietoolbar.com),
shared favorites (seehttp://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Family_History_Library_Internet_Favorites),
and bookmark synchronization (most notably XMarks).
For more information on social bookmarking, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking.
Social Networking
The
most successful sites on the Internet over the past few years have been social
networking sites, including FaceBook and MySpace. The
idea is to create a community that shares things or works together to help each
other.
FaceBook has become one of the largest
gatherings of individuals in history. To use FaceBook,
you need to sign up for an account, but it’s free. You then make other people
your friends, which allows for automatic links and notifications, if desired.
It has become the most common way for the younger generation to socialize and
is catching on with many in the older generation.
Naturally, there are some genealogical
applications, including We’re Related (#4 FaceBook
application!), FamilyTree Family Builder, Relatively
Me (OneGreatFamily), Genealogy Gifts, I Remember
(Footnote), and FamilyFacts (Ancestry). Look for a
lot more in the near future, including games. I also enjoy the Friend Wheel
(search for Friend Wheel in FaceBook). One of the
latest is GenSeek, a tool to make it easier to search
the Family History Library Catalog (only on FaceBook).
There are also a variety of groups for
discussion on FaceBook, but the only thing new about
that is the potential for friend tracking. The Photos section has some great
potential, especially when combined with the CoolIris
extension for FireFox (www.cooliris.com).
How about a site to foster cooperative
work among family members? One such is Family Pursuit at www.familypursuit.com. You can share
research and conclusions, pedigrees, sources, and even task assignments.
Twitter is a tool whose use has
changed. Originally designed for the young set to use socially, it has become a
business tool for the 25-60 age group to share ideas
and observations. People send brief messages via computer or cell phone about
an idea or thought they have. These short messages are called tweets. People
who tweet thought-provoking, original ideas get many people interested in
reading what they have to say. These people become followers. Many of the innovators
and thought-leaders of today tweet (or are twits) and have hundreds of
followers. You can also follow topics or categories of tweets – like FamilySearch, genealogy, web 2.0, social media, etc. People
who want to add a category just put a pound sign (#) in front of the keyword or
category. Then anyone following that category (called a hashtag)
gets a copy of the message. This is used a lot at conferences—just
make up a hashtag for the conference and you
can follow what everyone is thinking as it is happening. A great tool for
bringing tweets together is called TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com).
As
I was at lunch at the FamilySearch Developer’s conference (11 March2009), one
of the individuals at my table (Daniel Horowicz) said
“what we need is social networking for the dead.”
As
I thought about it, I became more and more excited about the idea. Why not have
pages for our ancestors, containing information about them and the people they
came in contact with? Why not let descendants browse not only information and
records about their ancestor, but also about their ancestors’ friends—those who
lived in the same area at the same time, who participated in the same events,
belonged to the same religious or ethnic groups, served in the same military
regiment, or travelled on the same ship or wagon train? We could have a social
network for our ancestors, linking them to others with things in common. I blogged about the idea at http://mannderings.blogspot.com/2009/03/social-networking-for-dead.html.
This idea has merit, and may be well worth pursuing.
Some
have implemented first steps towards such a thing, such as http://biographicalwiki.org,
http://chaunceywalkerwest.blogspot.com/,
and http://benjamin-kingman-curtis.blogspot.com/.
However, these offer the advantage of being wiki-like—everyone can add items,
but they don’t capture interrelations between deceased individuals.
The
first attempt I’ve recognized to create something like this in an interactive
way is the FamilySearch Life Browser, which is still only a prototype—see it at http://labs.familysearch.org/lifebrowser/.
A
major attempt to implement Facebook for the Dead is I
Remember, a Facebook applet by Footnote. See
a sample page and read more about it at the following links:
http://apps.facebook.com/i_remember/
http://www.geneamusings.com/2009/05/footnote-pages-on-facebook-great-idea.html
A more recent
effort to do something about this is the BYU journals project. This project
links journals or other content to unique individuals as shown on FamilyTree in new FamilySearch. This has tremendous
potential. See a demo video at http://journals.byu.edu/.
Google Labs
Of particular
importance are several Google projects in development. The most significant is
Google Wave, a platform for keeping content together across various formats,
including email, instant messaging, and web pages. With such things as instant
translation, synchronous editing of a single document, and OffiSync,
the future is very bright.
©Copyright 2006-9 by Alan E. Mann, AG®. All rights reserved. Written
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