Thursday, August 2, 2007

A Virtual Interview in "Internet Genealogy" Magazine

Miriam Midkiff alerted the genea-blogosphere to an article on Genealogy Blogs by Donna Pointkouski in the latest issue (September 2007) of Internet Genealogy magazine. She was kind to send along what I was quoted as saying:

"How do you start a blog? Can anyone be a blogger? Can it really help with your family history research? To answer these questions, I took a virtual tour of the blogging world and asked the experts--genealogist-bloggers--for advice. As with most bloggers, they had a lot to say! My panel of bloggers includes: [the list of other genea-bloggers], Randy Seavers from Genea-Musings http://randysmusings.blogspot.com/"

[Later in the article:]"Another popular genealogy blog is Randy Seavers' Genea-Musings. Randy's blog also started out including other topics, but genealogy quickly became the sole focus. Randy's original purpose was to share his research experiences with members of the local genealogical society. He also intended to create a website, but Randy became frustrated with the amount of work involved in creating new web pages. 'I wanted something more dynamic,' notes Randy. A blog became an easier way to disseminate his research tips, as well as genealogical news items and stories from his own family's history."

[Even further on:]"Randy Seavers cautions new bloggers against becoming frustrated by a lack of readers. 'Very few people write a comment, so it is easy to feel that no one is reading,' says Randy. He recommends free sites, such as http://www.statcounter.com/ or http://www.sitemeter.com/, which measure how many page visits your blog gets each day."

I do wish that she had spelled my last name right. It's not that hard - it's on the blog correctly! Oh well, it's the publicity that counts.

All of the words quoted above are from my email response to the author back in January (and I didn't find it in my email archives because of my computer crash in February). I am anxious to read what the entire article said - I'll wait and see if my CVGS colleague who subscribes to IG can show me the article.

Subscribing to Internet Genealogy is one of those "round tuit" tasks that I have on my list. Reader Randy Clark recently sent me an image of a "Round Tuit" so I cashed it in tonight and subscribed to the magazine.

My congratulations to the other genea-bloggers mentioned - Miriam has the list in her post. They are ALL on my must-read list every day, plus many others.

UPDATED 8/3 10 AM: I erred last night in my post about not being interviewed by the author - she did contact me by email back in January, and I responded to her many questions. My apologies to Donna. I fixed this post to reflect reality. It was an unreal day yesterday - I chased two little boys for about 12 hours and rushed three blog posts when I was really tired.

UPDATED AGAIN 8/3 8 PM: To Sally J. (from comments) - I'm sorry for the confusion here. Donna did contact me via email and I responded to her questions in some detail. She then used my words to write her story. I have no problem with what she wrote. This is my preferred way to do an interview - I can edit and refine my comments before I send them to the writer.

4 comments:

Drew Smith said...

I believe she got George's middle initial wrong, too.

Anonymous said...

First of all, congrats on the wonderful exposure, Randy!

This "virtual interview" concept has been bugging me ever since I read about it here.

I don't think it's OK for a magazine to print someone's writing without permission and then call it an interview.

Does anyone know if the author bothered to talk to *ANY* of the bloggers she quoted?

Sally J. said...

Just got an email back from Chris @ genealogue.com -- the author
*did* email him questions back in January.

Whew! I was worried the entire article was scraped off the internet.

But I still think she still should have asked your permission, Randy...

Donna said...

I asked permission of all of the bloggers in the article, including Randy. I guess it was so long ago, he just forgot. All quotes are direct quotes in response to my email questions. I do sincerely apologize about the misspelled name - I'm not sure how that happened.
Donna Pointkouski