Monday, October 2, 2006

We missed you at the chat

I guess everybody didn't get the message, or it wasn't that important.

There was a hardy crowd of about 15 on the GenealogyForum.org chat room tonight to see me expound on the whys and hows of Genealogy Blogging. I hope I did it justice, and that some of the attendees will make their way over here, read some posts, and then click the links to other genea-bloggers. Some may even become bloggers - the more the merrier, I say.

I am told that the text of my "lecture" will be posted on the GenealogyForum web site. When It is, I will add the link to this post.

I prepared about 5 pages of text in a question and answer format so that I could copy and paste it into the text box on the chat page. When I tested it out this afternoon, I found that only about 4 to 6 lines could be pasted at a time. That actually works out pretty well - I was copy/pasting at about the reading speed of the attendees. My typing finger was smoking! I kept the chat window open and my document window open and copied from one to the other. The only hangup was when the chat window didn't like either Dick Eastman's name or Leland Meitzler's name...it would not post what I wanted. I finally typed it in one phrase at a time - it was frustrating for awhile - and it finally took the names. It is difficult to "lecture" in this mode without visual aids.

The hosts/guides are very friendly and helpful and encouraging. They kept the questions out until I had finished the prepared lecture part of the session. The Q and A was a lot slower and easier to deal with, and at the end the session drifted away from blogging and into trying to match ancestors and the like.

While this format is interactive in near real-time, it is not nearly the same as putting eyeballs on the speaker and his material, or asking him questions and seeing/hearing the answers. I can see, in the future, a Skype-cast (like Dick Eastman is doing regularly) combined with webcams, at least of the speaker. Of course, that means the speaker would have to keep his/her clothes on while online...but we're used to that when we give society talks.

I hope that it was interesting to the attendees, and that they learned something, and hopefully they will come to visit this little corner of the genealogy world.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

in chat i am charles w. there is a bacon line that go,s into mn, and connects to ebner family of rushford , mn. in msn i am cw98106@msn.com. i find the blog information interesting, not sure if i will do it. charlesw

Erin said...

LOL Randy about the clothes comment! I was sorry I came in late last night, I lost track of time while studying! I have a blog myself on Yahoo! 360 (a more mature version of myspace.com in my opinion), but don't really talk much about genealogy. Great talk last night.

Not sure why the room had a problem with Leland Meitzler's name, I don't see anything that could be considered "bad" in it. Usually when that happens, what we do is separate the letters, like for Dick Eastman, it would be Di ck Eastman or something like that.

Looking forward to your next talk!

Host GFSErin