My Rooted Technology (a Meme)

With the RootsTech2012 Conference quickly approaching, Jill Ball of Geniaus started the following meme “My Rooted Technology” to share all of the technology we currently use, would like to know more about, or have no use or interest in. She has invited her readers to share their thoughts. Here is my technological profile:

Here are the rules:

·         Technology you already use: bold face type

·         Technology you would like to use or learn more about: italicize (color optional)

·         Technology you don’t use, have no interest in using or no longer use: plain type

·         Explain or give opinions in brackets [  ] at the end of each bullet point.

Here are my answers:

1.       I have a tablet computer such as an iPad that I use for genealogy [I wouldn’t mind giving an iPad a spin for genealogy applications].

2.       I have downloaded one or more apps to a Smart Phone or similar device. [I downloaded them onto my first android phone, but not to the 2^nd one as I was running close to going over my 2GB data plan limit.]

3.       I belong to a genealogy society that uses social media. [I am the one who brought my society to terms with social media.]

4.       I use GEDCOM files and understand the various compatibility issues involved. [These have especially come in handy with trying to find paper trail connections to my Family Finder DNA matches.]

5.       I have added metadata to some of my files and digital photos. [I would love to do more of this, but I fear it will disappear or not transfer.]

6.       I have utilized an API from a genealogy-related application or website.

7.       I have taken a DNA test related to my genealogy research. [Both of my Grandfathers have taken the Y-DNA test and I have taken the Family Finder DNA test and I just recently purchased kits for my parents.]

8.       I have used the FamilySearch Research Wiki.

9.       I have a Facebook account and use it regularly for genealogy.

10.   I use tech tools to help me cite my sources in genealogy research. [Probably not in the way you are referring, but I have my methods ;-)]

11.   I have developed a genealogy-related app for a Smart Phone or similar device.

12.   I use a genealogy database program. [Rootsmagic]

13.   I use cloud computer resources to store my genealogy data. [some of it is stored in the cloud – I try to keep my tree updated in Ancestry.com and I use Dropbox a lot.]

14.   I have made one or more contributions to the FamilySearch Research Wiki.

15.   I have attended a genealogy webinar.

16.   I have organized and administered a DNA testing group related to my genealogy.

17.   I use apps involving GPS and Geo-caching for my genealogy research.

18.   I have a Google+ account and use it regularly for genealogy.

19.   I have created and published a family history e-book.

20.   I have created a wiki related to my genealogy research.

21.   I have conducted a genealogy webinar as a presenter.

22.   I read genealogy-related blogs to help improve my own research. [Yes, I love reading about new technologies and how people solve problems.]

23.   I have one or more genealogy-related blogs to help improve my own research. [I have 3.]

24.   I have a Twitter account and use it regularly for genealogy.

25.   I have one or more genealogy-related websites which I run and administer. [Sounds like too much work! – I know the wiki is enough for me!]

26.   I have created a screencast or video related to genealogy and posted it at a video sharing site (Vimeo, YouTube, etc.).

27.   I use one or more digital tools to capture and record my family history. [I have used the video feature on my camera. I do not use my phone because I don’t know how to get them out of my phone.]

Reverting back to Blogger Profile

Yesterday I wrote about the option to switch your Blogger Profile over to your Google+ Profile. I found the major disadvantage to this being that when I left a comment on someone else's blog, the comment linked back to my Google+ profile instead of linking directly back to my blog. This kind of defeats the purpose of blogging which is to attract readers. Actually the link from comments was going back to my blogger profile and from there you could click on the link to my blog. This still seems better than going out to Google+, then having to come back to blogger?

The seamless or automatic updating of my Google+ profile with my new blog post did work well. When I clicked the "Publish" button, I was prompted with a dialog box and asked for a description or comment of the blog I was about to post. And it showed me a preview of the blog post (text). What showed up on my Google+ profile was a brief snippet of my most recent post and the comment I had written in the dialog box prior to posting.

Dialog box prior to posting on profile

Previously, manually pasting a link to my most recent blog post would not include a brief snippet of the post, but rather a snippet of the blog itself and was always the same no matter what new post I had written. It always said "I was researching Godwin and related families, etc..." I could probably fix this problem on my own just by removing the text from the header of my blog. I just hadn't gotten around to it. This is what my posts used to look like when I manually posted the links to Google+:

Manually updated link to my blog post

This is what my automatic post looks like on Google+:

Automatically updated blog post

Even though the new automatic posting process includes the post snippet, no where does it say that it comes from my Genealogy By Ginger blog! In fact, this "link" looks just like any other link I've shared on my Google+ Profile. How will people reading my news feed know if this is a post *I* made or if it is one that I shared?

And what about scheduled posts? How do you think Google+ will handle those? I had this post scheduled for Tuesday morning at 9 am. We will see what happens.
**Update Tues 9:32 am: This scheduled post did NOT automatically update to Google+. It did, however, automatically update to Facebook!

Summary:
1) When I leave comments on other blogs, readers are directed back to my Google+ page instead of my blog or blog profile, where they have to look for and find my blog address
2) Automatic posting of new blog posts is nice because it gives my most recent post snippet and allows me to write a comment; but it doesn't even say the name of my blog and makes it hard to discern between my blog post and other peoples' posts I've shared; Also, it does not automatically post scheduled posts.
3) I can alleviate the problem of manual posting not adding a snippet by removing text from my header
4) Last, but I'm sure not least, another reader told me that she didn't like that with the switch, the entire contents of the Google+ "Introduction" section of the "About" page were reproduced on her blog(s)' sidebar.

So what do you think? Is this really a choice or do you think we will all be forced to switch over to our Google+ profiles in the near future?

Oh and what if you want to revert back to your blogger profile? You do have 30 days to do so. Here's how you do it. Go to your Blogger dashboard (or whatever you call it). And click on the gear symbol below your name. There should be a link that says "Revert to Blogger Profile." See screenshot below (click on image to make it bigger).

Blogger Profile Switch to Google+ Profile

Back in October, Blogger started allowing us to connect our blogger profile to our Google+ accounts (See the news here). This was supposed to offer a seamless approach to automatically post our new blog posts to our Google + profiles much like Networked Blogs does on Facebook.

Well today I finally took the plunge and converted my blogger profile over to my Google + profile. From what I've read, most people were excited to do this because now their photo will show up next to their blog page when it comes up from a Google search. Well that's not news to me, as my photo has been coming up with my blog all over the internet. Except it does get confused when I change my photo sometimes.

When I created a Google+ account, blogger got really confused because I posted a different photo than what was on my blogger profile. It started showing a black box with the outline of a triangle in the photo that was supposed to stand beside my name when I left comments on other people's blogs.

Speaking of leaving comments. The first thing I noticed is that now that my blog is connected to my Google + account, when I leave a comment on someone else's blog, it shows my photo and my name, however, now when people click on my name, they are taken to my Google+ profile. Prior to switching to Google+, doing so would take them directly to my blogger profile which had my blog link directly on it. I think I like the former way better. And to be honest, this is how I visit many of my readers' blogs - by clicking on their names when they leave comments on my page. I'm not really interested in their Google+ profiles, but I am interested in their blogs!

So I think I might like to switch back to my blogger profile. After all, it did say that I have 30 days to do so. The purpose of this post is to try out the automatic posting feature that Google+ is promoting. I would also like to see if it actually gives a description of my blog post rather than just repeating the text that is in the header of my blog every time. That was the complaint I had with manually posting the link to each new blog post to Google+. I didn't have that problem with Facebook.

So here goes!
What will YOU decide to do?

Using Google Images to find your Ancestors

I think by now, we've all heard about TinEye, the reverse image search feature where you upload an image or type in a URL pointing to an image and it will show you all the places where that image has been used in the past or is currently being used on the Internetz.

And I'm sure you've all used Google Images to find that neat and great-looking image to use on your next blog post to spice it up a bit, but do you know...

How to identify an image using the Google Image search box? You can actually drag and drop a photograph you took or one that is in your collection directly into the Google Image search box and it will bring up on web pages containing that image.

Google has already let the cat out of the bag. You can follow along with their directions from their Google Image site. Here is a screenshot telling you how you can drag your image directly into the search box. (Remember you can click on any image to make it bigger, then click the back button in your browser to go back to the blog post).

So let's get started! 

I opened up my folder with my images in it. Then I opened up the Google Images webpage and I put the folder and the webpage side by side. The first image I chose was an image of Albert Einstein that I pulled off of the internet. As you can see the image was named "Albert Einstein.jpg" and it is a very popular image which is all over the internet, so I would expect google to find multiple instances of it. 

I simply drag the Einstein image from the folder into the Google Image search box. When I started dragging, the search image box got bigger and it told me to "Drag Image Here." I managed to capture this in the below screen shot: 

Google Images had no problem finding information on Albert Einstein and finding additional images of him. It reported that there were 89,800 results, so surely you could find whatever you were looking for. 

So I have shown how Google Images can pull up information based on an iconic figure, but what about my ancestor, T. J. Benson? I have saved a copy of his photograph in my Image photo and I named it "Image.jpg." I want to see if Google Images is searching by file name or by visual image characteristics. So I drag the photograph of my ancestor into the Google Image Search box and this is what I see for results:

At the top of the page it displays the image I searched with, then below that, it displays "Pages that include matching images." And of course, the only page it comes up with is my very own blog. Unfortunately, for some reason, it does not display the actual blog post, however it does display the Archive for the Month and Year in which that blog post was made. Users can then click on the link and scroll down through the list of posts for July 2010 until they come upon the post about T. J. Benson. 

How is this good for genealogy? It has been my experience that oftentimes several descendants have the same photographs of ancestors hanging in their living rooms while they were growing up. There has been at least two instances where I've received copies of photographs in the mail from cousins and then had the same photographs show up from different cousins several years later! (And no, it wasn't because the photos were distributed and copies all over Ancestry.com!) So I can see the benefit of running some of your ancestor's photos through the Google Image analyzer to see if any other copies of the photo has surfaced. Who knows, maybe one of your unknown cousins wrote a blog post about them! 

And what about those unknown people? Put those photos out there! You never know when you might find your photo on DeadFred!

Speaking of Ancestry.com, I was NOT able to pull up photographs that I knew were saved in public trees on Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com has their information locked up tight behind a membership wall. Likewise, I was not able to pull up headstone photographs from FindAGrave either. I was kind of surprised by that. I guess I kind of take access to FAG for granted.

I am not quite sure how exactly Google Images does this. But I can tell you that it doesn't seem to have a strong aspect of facial recognition because when I put random pictures of myself in the search box, it came up blank. One of my end of semester projects will be on exactly how queries are processed based on images submitted to a search box, so I might be able to answer this better come Christmas time. In the mean time try it out. Submit your photos of heirlooms, ancestors, and the cool stuff you see while on vacation and let me know about your experience!

Oh and feel free to share, tweet, etc. You know the drill!

Local Genealogy Society using Technology to reach out to Non-Local Members

The first quarter of 2011 is almost upon us and I wanted to highlight what my local genealogy group has been doing in order to keep up with all of the available advancing technology tools out there today in order to reach our ever growing non-local membership base.

One of our first goals is to reach out to our non-local members more.  In order to do this, we are trying to make our monthly meeting presentations available online for people to view from their homes or local libraries.  We are all pretty new to this, so we thought we would start small.

One of our members used her Kodak PlaySport to video our first presentation of the year done in January – that of Ernie Dollar – on the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. (Feel free to check out the program description here)  I learned some cool stuff about the cemetery that borders my alma mater. Check out my tweets @Smitty327 from Jan 5, 2011.  

The camera itself is quite compact, but it mounted easily to the tripod we had, so it was completely hands off.  The only problem we had was when we accidentally turned the camera off for a few seconds, at which point we were able to realize the mistake and resume recording.

The speaker talked from a podium, and showed slides from a projector onto a big screen beside him. Our video focused on the speaker, versus the slides because we knew we could always make the slides available separately. Alternatively I have visions of being able to edit the speaker’s video by incorporating his slides into the presentation at some point. I would like to learn how to edit video and clip stills out of it as well.  Do you have any experience in video editing you could share with us?

The file created is a 720 p .MOV file that ended up being humongous and way too big to upload to the web.  I did a couple of searches on the web and found that 1) you can change the recording settings from 720p to WVGA if you intend to upload the file to the web and 2) a file conversion program you can download here along with an easy to follow tutorial here explaining how to convert a .MOV file to other formats including a .FLV for YouTube!

I have not tried either of these two alternatives out yet because I do not own the camera, but I have forwarded the information on to the camera owner.  We hope to give it a try at least for #1 for our next meeting.

What to do when the speaker does not want to be taped?  By the way, we did video tape our second meeting of the year – Josh Howard’s program on the “Civil War Death Study” (D-OGS program details here)– which is an ongoing research program through the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. He did request that we not release the video to the public at this time as his research is ongoing and going to be published. The video can still be used to take notes from and publish on our website. I don’t know about your genealogy society, but ours always takes “meeting minutes” of our monthly meetings – a volunteer or “Secretary” will take notes about the program and then additional notes on the society “business” that is discussed at the end of the meeting after the program. This is a chance for the board to bring up issues that need to be voted on by the membership or make announcements.  Does your local genealogy society take and publish notes on your speaker presentations?

Our next step will be hopefully to get our presentations online and presented live for our out-of-staters and home-bound members. I am in the process of collecting information from other genealogy societies that are doing this such as the Utah Genealogical Society. You can visit their blog and see their “Virtual Chapter.” 

What does the future hold for my local genealogy society? More blogging, Facebook representation, surname and query exchange via online tools, records management and “cloud computing,” and online membership registration and renewal process.

What technological tools is your local society using?

Photo of PlaySport video camera downloaded from Amazon.com. 

Photo of USA Map downloaded from Smabs Sputzer’s Flikr page