Friday, February 3, 2012

Day 4 in SLC - RootsTech Day 2 morning

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So I neglected to write something for this morning.  By the way, I found my iPhone stylus in my pants pocket.  Duh!

It's been a busy morning, starting with a breakfast meeting sponsored by FamilySearch.  There were a number of tables with bloggers, sponsors and genealogy community people.  At my table were Lisa Louise Cooke, Paul Nauta and Ian Tester, and several others.  We had a lively discussion about family stories, Google Earth, house histories, and much more.  There was no formal program. 

Josh Coates was the keynote speaker for Friday, on the topic of Exabytes, Social Clouds, and Other Monstrosities.  Josh was high energy, high vision, and very funny.  Watch his talk about the history of data storage and social networks and more on the RootsTech.org video channel when it's available. 

The exhibit hall was open so I scored my usual spot at the Media hub blogger table and tried to get on the Internet but the blogger paparazzi wanted photos.  I watched DearMyrtle and Drew Smith interviewing people in the video and podcast booths.  Rather than go to a speaker presentation, I read my email and then wandered over to the Ancestry.com booth.  Michelle Pfister of Family Tree Maker, Russ Worthington and I had a great conversation about data entry methods, source citations, GEDCOM, TreeSync, and much more.  I appreciate Michelle taking the time to listen.  Then Tony Macklin of Ancestry Search came along and we talked about many of the same subjects, plus he showed me how Ancestry will be improving the search capabilities of census records, city directories and voter registers (the latter two will have an index search instead of the current OCR search, plus more indexed information like street addresses and occupations).

It's lunch time, so I will write more tonight after the afternoon session and the Night at the Library.

Two reminders:

1)  The Geneabloggers Radio show is on tonight at 9 p.m. EST (8 CST, 7 MST, 6 PST) with Thomas MacEntee and DearMyrtle hosting from the third floor of the Family History Library with guests from the genealogy community.  Tune in at www.blogtalkradio.com/geneabloggers/.  If you register and sign in, you can participate in the chat board too.

2)  The first episode of the Who Do You Think You Are? season is tonight on NBC television.  I think the times are 8 p.m. EST and PST, and 7 p.m. CST and MST.  Check your local listings!

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