Monday, July 20, 2009

Susi Chats about Blogs, and more

My CVGS colleague, Susi Pentico, started a blog called Susi's Chatty Performances on Genealogy after being inspired at the Bloggers Summit at the SCGS Genealogy Jamboree. I promised her that I would ask my readers to visit her site. So, if the spirit moves you, please read Susi's blog and put her in your blog reader of choice.

Her most recent post is titled Thoughts on Genealogy Research Sites and she ponders:

* Are the many blogs being written and read messing us up - are they time-wasters?

* Would our time be better spent working on volunteer genealogy sites like USGenWeb.org and Rootsweb.com?

My views include:

* Time management is the real issue here with blogs and other social networks. Some people read blogs using a Favorites or Bookmark system, others use a feed like Google Reader or Bloglines to organize their blog favorites and read them efficiently. I spent no more than 30 minutes a day reading the 508 blogs on my Bloglines list. There are probably 120 to 150 posts every day on my reader. On social network media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Genealogy Wise, I try to limit it to one or two visits a day - no more than 30 minutes total.

* Blogs have many roles - as a family history recorder (stories, photographs, diaries, documents, biographies, etc.) for relatives, a genealogy news broadcaster (press releases, commentary), database and website finder and tester (noting new or great databases and websites, demonstrating how to use them), commercial company interaction with customers, just to name a few. There is a place for all of these categories, and many more (I saw that Thomas just added over 80 categories of genealogy blogs at Geneabloggers!).

* Genealogy Blogs are, with two exceptions, totally free to read and comment upon. They provide an opportunity for every genealogist to share their research and their opinions - these opportunities used to be reserved for the elite genealogists that wrote and edited genealogy articles or columns. Blogs have democratized the discourse. They also provide a learning opportunity and proving ground for potential columnists and writers for traditional or online magazines.

* Blogs that don't post often, or are poorly written, or are offensive or wrong will quickly die off because nobody will read them. The voice of the blogger needs to be civil, constructively critical and accurate in order to gain the respect and attention of their readers.

* The emphasis back in the 1995 to 2005 time frame was on the volunteer sites like www.USGenWeb.org, www.Rootsweb.com, the Genforum message boards, the Rootsweb message boards and mailing lists. My observation is that the traffic and participation on many of these sites is way down - either they offer nothing new for users or new researchers are unaware of them. The message boards, in particular, are wonderful vehicles for finding distant cousins researching the same surname. The USGenWeb county boards seem stagnant, but that may be because they have collected just about everything that is available.

* I wonder if the diligence of FamilySearch and the commercial database websites (Ancestry, Footnote, WorldVitalRecords, GenealogyBank, NewEnglandAncestors, etc.) in providing indexed records in digital format has created a lethargy in both traditional and online genealogists. A counterpoint to this argument is that there are thousands of volunteer indexers working on Family Search Indexing and the Ancestry World Archives Project. Perhaps the volunteer efforts have just been oriented toward different projects.

* Like others, I have observed that the visitor count at local libraries and Family History Centers is way down from five to ten years ago. This is usually attributed to the myth that "it's all on the Internet now" that many of us hear or read about.

* Every genealogist has free will to do what they want in the time they devote to genealogical activities. I choose to blog, to read and learn, to network, to serve my local societies, to teach and present, to research online, at the FHC and at distant repositories, etc. I manage to fill a 60-hour week with all of these activities, plus my husbandly and grandfatherly duties. I do wish that I did more research and worked toward publishing my own ancestral books.

Well, I opined for awhile there, kind of in an organized stream of consciousness, eh? What do you think about these issues? Please tell me in comments or your own blog post, and please visit Susi's blog and comment on her thoughts too.

2 comments:

Geolover said...

Randy, you made two sets of comments that I think hark back to a much earlier post concerning changes in the genealogy 'community'.

First, regarding the volunteer sites and message boards, "The USGenWeb county boards seem stagnant, but that may be because they have collected just about everything that is available."

Er, I must strongly disagree. The County boards are extremely uneven in content (I know of one with no addition in 5 years, which has exactly one item that could be called a local record database, but the less said about it the better). In terms of content, only the teeniest imaginable percentage of County records, such as vitals, estate items, tax assessment rolls, land records and County Court records, not to mention cemetery readings, have been transcribed and posted by volunteers.

Second, "I wonder if the diligence of FamilySearch and the commercial database websites (Ancestry, Footnote, WorldVitalRecords, GenealogyBank, NewEnglandAncestors, etc.) in providing indexed records in digital format has created a lethargy in both traditional and online genealogists."

I do not know about GenealogyBank and NewEnglandAncestors, but none of the other sites have actual local (i.e., County, Church) records images, and the transcripts are often quite error-riddled. Books, newspapers and journal articles certainly have their place, but they are not at all the same as the actual source materials. They also center on New England, New York and/or emphasize "notable families," not much help for those of us with big 18th-century gaps among common folk.

What I would come back to is your comment some months ago about an item posted by Dick Eastman concerning a 'watershed' moment in genealogy on the web.

I think the true watershed is that the numbers of people doing actual research in local treasurehouses (the County Courthouses principally) has considerably declined. I think the 'watershed' is that the Tree People and many others think that the function of the Message Boards is to have other people hand them their research, in the same way as they lift others' trees.

I think one sign of this nature of the "watershed" is the number of posts on message boards complaining that other people don't put evidentiary sources in the Trees that they would like to take, or complaining that a response outlining a research plan did not give the genealogical answer wanted by the original poster: "what, me go to the courthouse? I can't do that . . . ."

So many of the bloggers have done actual research, and share their experiences. That is great, but those who have no intention of doing the research will not benefit from this, and may not even find it of interest unless they are unusually curious, looking for substantiation for something in their tree, and find an immediate genealogical answer in a blog by doing a web search.

I wonder if outfits like Ancestry.com have stats relating to changes in frequency of site use in Trees relative to database use.

Mary said...

Good question, Randy! Here's my two cents worth: http://ancestortracking.blogspot.com/2009/07/are-blogs-distraction.html