Increase font Decrease font

Genealogy & Social Networking Technologies #5- RSS Feeds

/ Thoughts / 0 Comment

RSS Feeds are one of the most stable and long running social tools on the web. As might be expected it is one of the two I started using first and the one for which I had the highest expectations.

As luck would have it , RSS feeds have been largely a disappointment for me. RSS feeds have been around for probably longer than any of the tools in my little survey. For most folks, RSS seems to be both a very reliable and stable method of retransmitting blogs to broad ‘external’ audiences, using an information ‘push’ toolset; meaning I push (send) my content out to you the reader and onto your machine (obviously with your permission, but nonetheless I push).

To quote the ever famous Wikipedia:

RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

Like most people, I use feeds to syndicate my content. Which is to say every time I write a ManyRoads posting or page, like this one, off it goes into the ether AND anyone connected to my feed gets a copy. It is a great idea; and the folks a Google Feeds who push my content around probably thought so too, at one time. However, today I have 6 times fewer RSS feed readers than I do twitter followers. My RSS feed readers are numbered in the 10s not the hundreds.

Given those statistics I have to assume one of few items either my content is poorly suited to RSS or more folks rely on twitter to connect them to the content they seek. My sense is that my latter assumption is most likely the case.

In truth, I will keep using RSS, because it is easy to use; and, there are folks who seem to like it. But, I have to think that RSS’ days are numbered and that RSS is a medium in decline.

Genealogy & Social Networking Technologies #4- LinkedIn

/ Tips & Opinions / 0 Comment

Unlike facebook, LinkedIn has been moving in positive and useful directions. To be honest, I have had enough success with LinkedIn that I have begun to expand my efforts on that social networking platform.

By way of a quick overview, to-date I have attempted the following activities with good success on LinkedIn. I have:

  • added LinkedIn friends and now have more than 500. As I have increased my associates so has the ManyRoads traffic increased.
  • created a Genealogy Group (Genealogy Guild) which now has more than 100 participants. There is limited activity in the group and some amount of traffic from the group to ManyRoads has yielded additional, albeit limited, information, opportunities, and discourse.
  • linked my tweets to LinkedIn and this Twitter interface seems to have generated a small but steady flow of additional readers and traffic to ManyRoads.
  • made my credentials and CV available. They appear to be accessed on a regular (daily) basis, presumably this provides an additional degree of professional visibility. Although, I would note this type of inference is extremely difficult or prove- one way or the other.
  • most recently, added my company information on LinkedIn, using the Company- beta function. I have great hopes for this newer service. It is worth noting that there seem to be those typical beta software problems plaguing the company edit and modification functions.

Assessing my experiences to date on LinkedIn, I would characterize them as being mostly positive and trending in even more positive directions. In the interest of balance and fairness though, I would have to say that this path has not been fast nor necessarily obvious.

Genealogy & Social Networking Technologies #3- facebook

/ Tips & Opinions / 2 Comments

Probably one of the biggest social networking disappointments for me, thus far, has been facebook. I have tried three differing facebook approaches/ venues, none seems to have worked very effectively.

Firstly, I tried the plain vanilla regular facebook friending protocol. Basically by that I mean, I joined facebook, made lots of friends and almost none of them visit my genealogy site (or other sites for that matter). I had hoped that family and friends would been interested enough to follow along and communicate or use ManyRoads, but I have been largely disappointed. My single notable success has been finding and re-meeting a long lost cousin. She ultimately had a neighbor friend of hers translate my German Oma’s (grandmother’s) Soviet post-WW2 bills of indictment and incarceration in a Stalinist Gulag. Truly that was a significant accomplishment, but given I have been ‘active’ on facebook for more than two years, this experience has been largely disappointing.

The next major foray, I had into the facebook world, involved the creation of a ManyRoads facebook group. Aside from one member, one time, I believe I have been the entire compliment of writing and discussion. In the main, the experience feels a lot like being in an empty auditorium shouting to myself. The group looks nice but yields nothing. So goes my second sad facebook effort.

Lastly, I have tried syndicating, publicizing ManyRoads via Networked Blogs on facebook. Aide from using an unacceptable amount of website CPU cycles, that turned out to be a complete nothing. Setting things up took a fair bit of work and produced so little I was unable to measure its “minusculeness”. At one point, I even tweeted begging for any of my Twitter followers to ‘like’ my blog. I received one whole response. Granted this site is of limited interest and excitement but… there we have yet another facebook disappointment.

I guess I would conclude this brief discourse by summarizing my facebook experiences as having been a lot of effort producing very little in the way of tangible, traceable results. If facebook were to disappear today, I doubt either my genealogy efforts or the ManyRoads’ site traffic would suffer very much; they certainly don’t seem to have benefited excepting in the one instance.

I certainly hope you have had much better success.

New Translation function

/ Site, Tools / 0 Comment

A new web-page translation function has been added to ManyRoads. The Wibiya bar, where our translation function was previously provided, has been eliminated. We eliminated the bar based in large part on the recommendations and comments of Matt Mullenweg (the designer/inventor of WordPress).Globe

Additionally, you may have noticed that the performance of ManyRoads had begun to degrade significantly over the past weeks; we believe this was due in no small part to the performance of Wibiya as well as that of other plugins.  So given we would like things to move quickly, I cleaned things up a bit.  I rolled the site back to a few previously utilized plugins, like Sexy Bookmarks; and am hoping for the best, performance-wise.

Our new translation plugin (called the Google Ajax Plugin) seems quite light and fast.  It was however originally a tad austere from an appearance perspective.  I added a bit of color and hope that things are none the worse for my efforts. I, however, have noted one possible exception and that is you will need to Select English Translation to return to the base level system should you inadvertently select the Translate function.

I hope this plugin does a reasonable job of providing both translations and information access to ManyRoads’ non-native English readers.

8th Semi-irregular ManyRoads Newsletter

/ Site / , / 0 Comment

First, let me apologize for the delay in publishing the ManyRoads, semi-irregular Newsletter.  But as you might imagine, things here have been busy, hectic, and ‘interesting’.  Holidays, the end of the year plus some unanticipated technological & familial ‘adventures’ have all played their part in the delay.  Oh well….

From a genealogy perspective things have been interesting and fun. We managed to identify numerous “new to us” relations, friends, documentation, and histories. Our website traffic has continued to grow, although more slowly than before. I certainly also am appreciative of the many folks who have written us and also to those new subscribers of our Newsletter.

As you may have noticed, the past month included a fairly eclectic variety of postings and updates.  I am most pleased with the updates in our Verteibung, Elbing Damals Galleries as well as to our Prussian Addressbooks. We also managed to add several new maps and map pages to the site during December and January- all in the Prussian maps area.

Once again, numerous, very thoughtful and generous folks have sent us materials to share on the web. We greatly appreciate the ‘donations’ and will make them available as we are able. If you have photos, maps, stories that you think fit with our audience and subject matter, we’d love to hear from you.

Lastly, before I announce the list of last months publications, I would emphasize one posting above all: On the “Vertreibung”, Expulsions, and Hope . This posting came about due to popular demand.  I hope it helps explain my perspective and provides a clearer context for my efforts in that arena.

Finally the list! Here are other ManyRoads items of note published during the past month or so:

As always, I want to request any/all of you who have genealogical websites please consider reciprocal linking with ManyRoads. There is no cost and both your site and ManyRoads will benefit from the links. Simply place a link to http://many-roads.com on your site; send me an email letting me know you have made the link; and, I’ll place a link to your site.

Just knowing…

/ Thoughts / 2 Comments

Knowing our family origins brings a comfort that is hard to explain, but priceless to those seeking and finding.
I could not have said it better.

The above quote was one I received today in an email from one of my clients. I think the message is clear, succinct, and one which most of us who chase ancestors would heartily agree.

The words moved me. I thought perhaps they might move you as well.

Genealogy & Social Networking Technologies #2- Twitter

/ Tips & Opinions, Tools / 2 Comments

Surprisingly, Twitter has become an essential communication vehicle for me. And, no one is more surprised than I am. I never thought that I would become a Twitter user, much less become one of those people who rely on Twitter.

Initially,I thought that Twitter was both frivolous and oriented towards the younger folks. I guess that probably says something more about me becoming stodgy and old then it says anything useful about Twitter; but nonetheless one fine day, I gave it a whirl.  The rest is history.  Now, I use Twitter everyday I use the computer, which is to say almost everyday.

With Twitter’s 140 measly ‘allowable’ characters, I am able to announce what I am doing and discovering to the world, or at least to that little part of the world interested in #genealogy, #ahnenforschung, #history etc. And amazingly enough, you the ManyRoads reader who also uses Twitter comes by for a look-see.  People I never knew, or knew might be interested in mywork, stop by, share information or simply become stealth readers; by the way, that is approximately 99.98% of you (Yes, I am one of those guys who tracks statistics…).

Additionally, Twitter has provided me with avenues for sharing what I find, or more precisely what other ‘Twitterers’ find,  as you can see on our News! page. I am able to filter the news streams, build lists of people (other Twitterers) with whom I share common interests (see My ManyRoads List). I use (meaning read) their/your feeds then either for myself alone or for further sharing and aggregation.

I am able find new information from people and places around the globe covering topics such as:

  • #genealogy
  • #genealogists
  • #famhist
  • #ancestry
  • #familysearch
  • #familytree
  • #surnames
  • #historic
  • #antique
  • #ancient
  • #brickwall
  • #archives

In Twitter speak, words prefaced with # are called hash-tags (hastags). Truly they are nothing more than keywords, if you will, for sorting through the piles of streaming Tweets/ information, in order to see those topics in which I, and you if you use them, are interested.  I personally find the above hash-tags to be very good for finding meaningful genealogy information and articles. Additionally, I am able to use those very same hash-tags for generating information feeds to various software systems like paper.li and Gwibber, the social feed reader I use.

As you well know, both genealogy and genealogical research are reliant on finding hidden, not easy to locate, information. A communication tool like Twitter has become, in this arena, a real asset in finding information… previouly hidden and obscure, to me.  It is also a useful communication vehicle which facilitates meeting, talking, and connecting with like minded individuals- those people searching for information similar to that which I seek.

More to come…

Further Readings

Genealogy & Social Networking Technologies #1

/ Tips & Opinions, Tools / 0 Comment

Social networking (media) ought to be a useful adjunct to genealogy research. Or more complexly stated, genealogy and genealogists should benefit greatly through improved interpersonal, Internet communications technology (better known as social networking).  Of late, I have been trying to employ a number of web oriented ‘social’ technologies in an effort to up ManyRoads site readership and traffic.

It probably bears stating, the reason I (and most genealogy bloggers) seek higher traffic is because I both appreciate and need the contact/ interaction in my genealogy searches/ efforts.  By that I mean, you (our reader) have knowledge and information that might help me in my search(es), just as I have information that might help you in yours.  Yes in addition to my personal efforts I, also, do genealogy work for fee; but as anyone who has been on ManyRoads very often knows, I provide a lot of information, images and documents for free and without strings.  And, much of that information has been sourced through your good communications to me.

To place the success of my efforts, thus far,  in a tangible context, I would share the following.  Out of the 160,000 +/- page reads, 65,000 visitors we have had during the past year I have made contact with approximately:

  • 10 new “to me” cousins
  • a few new clients
  • 10 GB of new information (all stored here on ManyRoads for everyones’ use)
  • numerous valuable and detailed assists in the editing my genealogy work
  • dozens of photos of family members that I did not know existed
  • numerous unbelievable and useful links to previously lost aspects of my family’s past

Well you get the idea.  It takes a lot of traffic to keep and create a good information flow; and, such is the context within which the communication technologies I am about to discuss operate.  Each medium attempts, in one way or another, to reach out into areas and places in the hope/ desire of triggering mutual information sharing and communication. The most significant aspect of this ‘reaching out’ is that it is almost blind. It’s a bit like putting your arm under a rug and reaching, rummaging, searching for a lost pebble.  You do not know the shape, the location, texture, or size of the pebble, nor can you see it.  You simply know it might be there and you want to find it. So, you reach.

In subsequent articles (posts) I will discuss my efforts with the following social technologies:

  • facebook
  • linkedin
  • networkedblogs
  • twitter
  • yahoo groups
  • rss feeds

By the way, I doubt there will be single, dedicated posts for each item on the above list.

If there are technologies you want to hear about, but they are not on my little list, please let me know.  I may have tried them and would be happy to share what I have learned; if not, perhaps I should try them and then share what I learn.  More to come…

Further Readings

%d bloggers like this: