Thursday, July 3, 2008

Another View of the Blogger Summit

Gilles Cayouette is a genealogy blogger who writes Le chercheur nomade - The Nomadic Researcher blog "about genealogy in Quebec with examples pertaining to the direct descendants of Gilles Caillouet (the Caillouet, Caillouette and Cayouette...)."

Gilles read the posts about the SCGS Genealogy Blogger Summit and posted his observations in French and English, raising some interesting issues and questions. Read his blog post for his observations.

His questions include (my paraphrases):

* Are genealogy bloggers journalists?

* Does the quest for instantaneity affect post quality?

* What about ethics in blogging?

* How can bloggers improve blog post quality?

* What are the opportunities to create both a society web site and blog?

Read the whole post - definitely a different point of view and one that needs to be included in the genealogy blogger "social network."

My thanks to Gilles for emailing me with the link to his blog. I wish I spoke French, but I don't.

UPDATED 11:15 a.m. Gilles wrote me to correct the spelling of his surname and to tell me that he was not at the Jamboree, that he read the comments about the Jamboree online. My apologies for not double-checking those facts!

1 comment:

JDR said...

Go many questions. So little time.

Are genealogy bloggers journalists?

Bloggers are more like newspaper columnists than journalists. They tend to introduce opinion "it was a good meeting" where a journalist is supposed to refrain from interpretation and present facts or a description of events -- see the definition of journalism in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia available via Google.

That does not mean that bloggers can't be influential. I've been told my blog is copied in the clipping service for Library and Archives Canada. From the log I know it's also looked at by people at TGN. I've been told that as bloggers tend to cover news that would never attract coverage in the mainstream media there is a trend to organizations giving bloggers access similar to that afforded journalists.