It’s been a heads-down week here at Genlighten.com, with pretty much every spare moment devoted to trying to recruit more genealogy researchers to our lookup provider network. Beginning last Saturday night, we began composing and sending out individual e-mails to around 760 genealogical societies in the US and Canada. Our basic pitch was simple. It boiled down to:

“We’re building an e-commerce platform dedicated to making it simple to offer fee-based genealogy lookups. If your volunteers sign up to provide lookups through our site on behalf of your society, we’ll return 90% of the fees they earn to you. In return for our 10% commission, we’ll handle payment processing, tracking of incoming lookups, communication between client and provider, etc..”

The last of the e-mails went out last night. Here are some stats we’ve gathered thus far:

• Number of messages sent out: 759
• E-mail addresses that bounced: 68
• Societies that weren’t interested: 5
• Societies considering our site: 15

Those numbers definitely tell a story, though I’m not sure yet exactly what it is. Here are some preliminary reactions:

• The bounced addresses all came from sites that I’ve visited within the last several months. Admittedly, some said they hadn’t been updated since 2001(!) so I anticipated plenty of undelivered messages. But it’s still kind of jarring to think that almost 10% of county genealogical sites that currently exist aren’t being actively maintained.
• Several of the societies that wrote back to say they weren’t interested explained, in polite terms, that they were philosophically opposed to charging for lookups as a source of revenue. That’s a sentiment I both understand and respect. Only one message thus far had any hint of “we’re morally above any such thing.”
• Many of the interested respondents indicated that they’d need to consult their society’s board of directors before proceeding. That certainly makes sense. But it hadn’t dawned on me that it might be a while before they would next meet. So perhaps some of those “no response” societies will meet and get back to me over the next month or so.

All in all, I’m cautiously optimistic about these results.  Now that we’ve made an initial effort to inform genealogical societies about our online lookup marketplace, we plan to expand our recruiting efforts to encompass an even broader potential audience.  This coming week, we’ll be reaching out to APG members and other fee-based genealogy researchers who we’ve learned about through exhaustive web searches.  Wish us luck!

A poster on the APG message board last week mentioned that a client was looking for a web-based collaborative genealogy service and asked for recommendations. Requirements included the ability to

• store contact info for living relatives
• produce print-outs displaying relationships, and
• let collaborators edit stored info.

One respondent suggested Darin Lythgoe’s The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG). I recommended Geni. Several others discussed the merits of WeRelate. It occurred to me today that neither the LDS Church’s New FamilySearch nor Ancestry’s Family Tree had come up at all in the discussion, though both seemed relevant to the requirements listed in the original post.

I can’t claim to be an expert user of any of these web-based services. I’ve explored Geni in some detail and I like what I’ve seen so far. I’ve also begun transferring my own genealogy data from PAF to New FamilySearch. But because I’m trying to be more diligent than I have been in the past in documenting each individual I enter, that process is proceeding quite slowly.

I’ve decided not to let my lack of expertise prevent me from blogging on the subject. I’m interested in all of these services, and I’ll use this post as an excuse to explore them a bit further.

Geni

First, Geni.com. Geni bills itself as a free family tree online. The site has received a lot of praise (well-deserved, I believe) for its simple and intuitive user interface. The initial screen for first-time users presents a minimalist pedigree chart and asks you to enter your own name and e-mail address. You’re then guided to enter your parents (and their e-mail addresses). The emphasis here is not so much on dates and places but on e-mail connections to living relatives. The idea is to let relatives know via e-mail that you’re working on your family tree. They can jump in and contribute additional details and connections themselves.

This is the core of the service, but Geni offers a rich variety of additional features. You can share family photos and add them to detailed profile pages for each person in your tree. Gedcom files can be imported if you’ve already collected a lot of info. Geni will map the location of each of your relatives and ancestors, and create a timeline of events in their lives. You can send virtual gifts, reminders and birthday greetings to living members of your tree. Though the interface has become a bit more cluttered as new features have been added, the site remains pleasant and satisfying to use. What’s more, the site is completely free and has no annoying ads. (The business model may evolve over time.)

The printing capability is basic but produces great-looking results. I’ve heard Geni plans to eventually offer poster-size or frameable print-outs as a possible revenue source. I suspect they’ll do an excellent job when they get that going.

Experienced genealogists won’t find the research and documentation tools at Geni.com that they expect and need, though those capabilities may be offered later.

Geni shines as a particularly fun and simple way for beginners to get started with building their family trees. The site is optimized to make genealogy a tool for social connections among family members. It also offers helpful support forums and a vibrant user community.

Ancestry Family Tree

Ancestry has long allowed users to enter their family tree data on their site without the need to pay for a subscription. In its current incarnation, the tree builder utility is set up to prompt users with ’shaking leaves’ if Ancestry thinks it has info relevant to a particular ancestor. This strikes me as a cute feature that could potentially grow annoying over time, particularly if I wasn’t looking to become a subscriber anytime soon. Ancestry also offers the ability to share information you enter and discover with others, who can sign up to view the site after an e-mail invitation from you. The interface lacks some of the Flash-based bells and whistles that Geni offers, but is nonetheless quite usable.

Where Ancestry’s service particularly shines is in the multi-media elements you can add to enhance your family tree. Photo uploading is supported, as with Geni, but the site also offers a unique audio storytelling service that I find particularly appealing. Basically, you can preserve stories from your living relatives (by interviewing them, even via telephone) or from deceased relatives, by recording them online. I haven’t yet tried it, but this strikes me as a compelling and worthwhile feature. I might be more likely to actually make audio recordings then I would videos (which Ancestry also supports.)

For more serious researchers, the site allows you to enter research notes. But it doesn’t offer a convenient way to organize or annotate source documents in digitized form, which I would find extremely useful.

All-in-all, Ancestry’s offering is full-featured, well-thought out, and provides a convenient (if slightly annoying) gateway to their fee-based research and publishing offerings. For those interested, a much more thorough review than mine was published by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal back in 2006.

New FamilySearch (NFS)

It’s probably a little early to review this site, since it’s still very much under development and is currently only available to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). It will eventually be made available to the public however, and I’m beginning to use it more and more, so it makes at least some sense for me to consider it here.

NFS’s interface at this point feels substantially heavier and more cluttered than that offered by either Geni or Ancestry. It clearly aims to make a large amount of data and navigation options available on a single page. Whereas with Geni the user can navigate their entire tree almost effortlessly by simply dragging their mouse, NFS requires extensive clicks and page loads to accomplish the same task. Of course, the comparison is somewhat unfair, since NFS’ mandate is considerably more extensive than simply allowing collaborative online family tree management, and its feature set reflects that mandate.

NFS’s ambitious aims include:

• permitting different users to submit conflicting data on the same unique individual
• tapping into the LDS Church’s extensive online databases of genealogical information to allow duplicate entries for the same individual to be combined (and disputed).

As a consequence of this approach, NFS does not create a private “online shoebox” into which users can deposit their personal genealogy data, isolated from that of all other users. Instead, NFS provides a single set of scaffolding intended to potentially encompass the family tree of every individual who has lived. Users affix their data to that scaffolding, then work to address the conflicts that inevitably arise in the process. In this respect, NFS resembles Wikipedia more than it does a traditional genealogy program. It’s entirely possible for you to visit your tree one day, enter data on a new individual you’ve identified, and go back the next day to find that someone you don’t know has combined your entry with a similar but nonetheless different one. Other users can’t edit your submissions, but they can add their own to go right alongside yours. This takes some getting used to.

At this point, NFS does not allow for any multimedia content to be uploaded, though that capability is planned for the future. Simple mapping and timeline displays are offered, though they’re not particularly sophisticated. Extensive source documentation and research notes are supported, however. This feature should gradually become more and more valuable as a tool in resolving disputes that arise over key genealogical details between contributors.

From what I’ve seen so far, NFS’s print capability is fairly rudimentary, enabling only basic reports and charts with few options for customization. This likely reflects FamilySearch’s strategy of relying on third-party software developers (e.g. Ohana Software and Generation Maps) to enhance and build on NFS’ functionality through their compatible offerings.

Unlike Geni, which brings interactions with living relatives front and center, NFS treats living individuals primarily as a bridge to one’s ancestors. Connections with other researchers pursuing your same lines can in theory be made via e-mail, but so far most of the contributors I’ve come across are not accessible in this manner.

NFS offers extensive online tutorials and a great deal of context-sensitive on-screen help. Phone support is also available, though it’s definitely a work in progress.

In summary, NFS aspires to become much more than either Geni, Ancestry, or their competitors. As a result, it lacks their nimble, agile feel, and the resulting user experience seems a little more like work than fun. However, because it will eventually become a key access portal for the LDS Church’s extensive (some would say indispensable) genealogical holdings, it is likely to evolve a great deal over the coming years and will likely improve substantially with time.

Summary

Geni — Strengths

• Appealing, intuitive, flash-based interface — simple and fun to use
• Strong social-networking capabilities for keeping in touch with living relatives
• Supports photo uploading (video coming soon)
• Dynamic and helpful user forum
• Completely free and no ads

Geni — Weaknesses

• Lacks support for research notes, documentation, or source tracking
• Limited printing options (though this is likely to improve soon)
• No convenient access to research databases, images, or other resources

Ancestry Family Tree — Strengths

• Straightforward, familiar interface
• Excellent multimedia capabilities (images, audio, video)
• Support for basic research notes
• Convenient (though expensive) access to extensive research resources and publishing options

Ancestry Family Tree — Weaknesses

• No easy way to organize or annotate research results or documentation
• Though it’s “free” users are constantly offered not-so-free options

New FamilySearch — Strengths

• Collaboration is at the core of the site, not just an add-on feature
• Free integrated access to extensive FamilySearch databases and other resources
• Allows for detailed research notes and source information
• Extensive context-sensitive online help and phone support

New FamilySearch — Weaknesses

• Dense, static feel to pages; link-heavy navigation
• Limited printing capability (though 3rd-party software will provide enhancements)
• No multimedia support (this is planned for a later iteration)
• Collaborative aspects feel more adversarial than supportive; difficult to contact other contributors

This has been a fairly superficial overview based on my admittedly limited experience with these services. Feel free to let me know in the comments what I’ve overlooked or misunderstood. Also, please let me know of your experiences with other comparable sites. Thanks!

Three days without a post — bad sign from a novice blogger. One of the things that impressed me about the participants in the recent Genealogy Blogger Summit was the consistency and frequency with which they post. I’m determined to follow their example, but I also want to get at least five hours of sleep! Sleep has won out the past few days. But enough blogging about blogging.

Revisiting our Customer Surveys

I thought it might be interesting to try to mine more insights from the surveys we administered to ChicagoGenealogy.com customers (and a few potential Genlighten users) earlier this year. To summarize the basic parameters: we surveyed 469 genealogy enthusiasts who had either ordered a document lookup from ChicagoGenealogy.com or met me at a genealogy conference during the last half of 2007 and early 2008. Roughly 230 completed the survey. 70% of them were female; 70% were also 50 years old or more.

One of the things surveys like this are supposed to do is help marketers define “personas” that reflect their customers’ preferences and behaviors, in hopes that the personas serve as a kind of shorthand for “who are our customers and what to they want?”. In theory, a good persona helps answer questions like “how many cupholders should we put in this minivan?” or perhaps more relevant to us at Genlighten, “what kind of navigation elements should our homepage have?”

We asked several questions in our survey that were aimed at developing personas from our potential customer base. The first asked basically “Why do you pursue genealogy research?” We offered six possible answers; respondents could also write in their own “other” response. The results are shown below:

“To feel a sense of connection with my deceased ancestors” was the number one choice, followed closely by “it’s a genuinely fun use of my time and skills”. No big surprises there for most of us, I suspect — those would probably have been my main choices too. Richer insights emerged in the “Other” responses, however. Two respondents thought genealogy helped them “to get a better sense of ‘who I am’”. And several others hoped their research would “leave a family legacy”.

Our next question tried to determine which components of the family history process respondents enjoyed most. It was basically a four-way tie among “pushing back further generations”, “finding source documents”, “sharing them with others”, and the narrow favorite “solving genealogical puzzles”. The average level of enjoyment for these activities fell between “Greatly Enjoy” and “Tremendously Enjoy”.

Given that we’re building a website that helps researchers get documents from distant archives without the need to travel there themselves, it was of course gratifying that survey respondents found traveling long distances the least enjoyable of the activities we listed. Whew!

Lessons Learned

Since the questions we asked (and the possible responses we offered) strongly reflected our own personal biases, the survey results didn’t yield as many startling new insights as we might have hoped. More open-ended short-essay-type questions might have corrected that, but the response rates to those kinds of questions would probably have been much lower.

The beginnings of some useful persona definitions did emerge. I’ll postpone a detailed description of them for a later post, but here are some key points we took away about Genlighten’s likely target audience:

• They want genealogy to be a fun experience that builds lasting bridges to their ancestors
• They see genealogical documents as key pieces of the puzzles they need to solve if they are to successfully reach back additional generations in their family history
• Once they’ve found those documents and solved those puzzles, they’re eager to share what they find with others

These ideas are constantly in our minds here at Genlighten, and we’re determined to let them shape and refine the user experience we’re working hard to create.

There’s been a lot of excitement surrounding the release of Cook County Illinois vital records online last week. Leland Meitzler tried the site and initially found the images to be of poor quality, but quickly discovered that when downloaded and brought into Photoshop they were quite clear. A firestorm of comments have appeared on Dick Eastman’s blog, most complaining about the index, the cost, the site functionality, or all three (and that’s not to mention the usual conspiracy theories.) I thought I’d offer a somewhat different perspective.

For the last four years or so, my wife has been providing lookups of Cook County vital records from the FHL microfilm copies available at our local Family History Center. The FHL microfilmed records don’t cover the full range of years offered by the new Cook County site. But they are of similar image quality. Here’s a side-by-side (or top and bottom) comparison of the same death certificate from two sources. The first image is the one downloaded by Leland (which I screengrabbed from his blog) and the second one is an image that my wife scanned from the corresponding FHL microfilm.

Superficially, as you’d expect, the images are quite similar. Both contain the same information. Both are quite legible. But there are some subtle differences. The FHL image has a smudge in the lower left (present on the film). More interesting, however, is the additional handwritten “9/a” in the upper right-hand corner of the FHL version. Does this imply that there were multiple sets of paper records, and that different versions were microfilmed by the two projects? Or is there some alternate explanation? Please feel free to speculate in the comments. [I have no idea myself.]

As for alternative sources to check if you can’t find the record you want at the Cook County vital records site, I’ll suggest four. [There are several others, as have been pointed out in the comments to Dick's post and elsewhere.]

1. Check the indexes at the Illinois Secretary of State’s office and proceed to order the appropriate Chicago or Cook County films from the FHL. (This is not always a straightforward process — Chicago and Cook County records are on separate sets of films.)
2. Visit either Molly Kennedy’s site or www.chicagogenealogy.com and follow the instructions given at these respective sites. [Note: if you use chicagogenealogy.com, I will benefit financially.]
3. For 1916-1947 Cook County death certificates, you can try the Illinois State Genealogical Society’s service.
4. For marriage licenses up to 1900 and Cook County Death Certificates (outside the City of Chicago) 1878-1909, contact the Illinois Research Archives Depository (IRAD) at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU): 773-442-4506.

None of these options is free, though all will cost you less than the $15 charged by Cook County. What these options won’t do is give you the “instant gratification” that the new Cook County site can potentially deliver. For all the complaints I’ve read about their new service, I think it’s important to remember a few key points:

• This is the first week the site has been up and running officially. No website is ever perfect right away. [Counter-examples welcome.] Please consider cutting the county some slack here!
• As of a week ago, you would have had to wait 2-3 weeks for these records. You can now receive them immediately, at the same cost as before. That’s a big improvement if you’re in a hurry!
• At a time when many government agencies have chosen to make access to vital records less convenient (or more costly, or both), Cook County has headed in a genealogy-friendly direction. To me that merits more kudos than complaints.

Charlie O’Donnell at Path101 responded to Fred Wilson’s post earlier today on deceptive statistics by asking his readers to link, post, comment, Digg… whatever, all in an effort to measure the influence his blog really has, as well as the engagement of his readers. Though his perspective is that of a startup entrepreneur (rather than a genealogy enthusiast), the issues he raises seem highly relevant to Genealogy bloggers and their audiences.

I’ll offer an example. At the recent Summit at the SCGS Jamboree, Leland Meitzler brought up the power of RSS feeds for quickly retrieving the latest from our favorite blogs. Several panelists indicated they used RSS themselves, but few seemed to have a good feel for who their RSS subscribers were and just how engaged they really were. I forget who said it, but I recall the comment being made that it wasn’t feasible to serve ads to (and gain ad revenue from) RSS subscribers. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’m pretty confident that the folks at Feedburner would beg to differ. My point is this: we could probably all stand to understand the significance of our readership stats a little better. [Randy Seaver's analyses of his site's stats stand out as an example of what we could be doing in this regard.]

Back to Charlie’s post — he asked a pointed question that I’d like to pass along to the readers of this blog:

“If the people reading aren’t doing anything, either passing your message on or responding, what’s the point of having readers?”

Personally, as a perennial ‘lurker’ on many blogs and message boards, I’m inclined to disagree. What do you think?

I’ve enjoyed today’s Independence Day posts from several of the bloggers I subscribe to via RSS, whether a simple quoting of the Declaration or a video clip of a fictional call to arms from the “President” in the movie Independence Day. I have my own favorite literary reference to the meaning of the Fourth, and I’d like to share it with you, my readers (though I apologize in advance to those who may find it offensive). It’s from Little Town on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We read the whole “Little House” series to our kids when they were young, and the books continue to have a cherished spot in our family’s shared memories of that time.

The setting is De Smet, South Dakota around 1880. It’s the fourth of July in the tiny town, and a small impromptu celebration has been organized, including horse races and lemonade. A local political type rises to speak, and Laura and her family pay close attention. He begins to read The Declaration of Independence. We’re told:

“Laura and Carrie knew the Declaration by heart, of course, but it gave them a solemn, glorious feeling to hear the words.”

How many of us can say we know it by heart?

The reading of the declaration concludes, and Laura’s narration continues:

“No one cheered. It was more like a moment to say “Amen.” But no one quite knew what to do.

Then Pa began to sing. All at once everyone was singing:

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing…

Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light.
Protect us by thy might,
Great God, our King!

The crowd was scattering away by then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king.

She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.

Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good…

Laura had no time to think any further. Carrier was wondering why she stood so still, and Pa was saying, “This way, girls! There’s the free lemonade!”

Hope you enjoyed Laura’s insights as much as I do. Happy Independence Day!

The Ancestry Insider posted a somewhat cryptic note on his blog today indicating that he would be leaving Ancestry on July 11th and starting work at FamilySearch on July 28th. That could simply reflect an innocuous move forward along a pre-planned career path. But it’s natural to speculate otherwise. Did his sometimes critical musings on Ancestry’s strategy or the site’s functionality eventually drive a wedge between him and his co-workers/supervisors? Did FamilySearch officials get a sense of his insight and domain expertise from his blog, and recruit him away?

All else being equal, the best employees tend to move from companies whose level of innovation and excitement is fading towards those with momentum, “buzz”, or a more entrepreneurial culture. [Witness the many former Ancestry employees now making an impact at Footnote, for example.] Is that pattern at work here? If so, it says something eye-openingly positive about the working atmosphere at FamilySearch.

I for one am eager to learn more about the Insider’s rationale for the move and whether it says as much about the two companies involved as it does about the Insider himself.  Do tell!

This post from the folks at 37Signals is the most powerful and positive piece of startup advice I’ve seen in the year I’ve been working on Genlighten.  I read it in breathless disbelief.  Disbelief that David could so clearly grasp both the quiet counsel that got me started on this path and the loud fantasy that often tries to drown out that counsel.

“The classic argument for enduring 80 to 100 hour work weeks for years on end — sacrificing relationships, hobbies, and anything else that doesn’t progress the mission — is that at the end of the rainbow lies early retirement. The reward for risking it all on a crazy startup idea. This wonderful place is filled with anything you want it to be. Never a dull moment again, all the flexibility and freedom in the world.

Why does the idea of work have to be so bad that you want to sacrifice year’s worth of prime living to get away from it forever? The answer is that it doesn’t. Finding something you to love to work on seems to be a much more fruitful pursuit than trying to get away from the notion of work altogether.

It’s much easier too! The likelihood that you’ll strike gold after year’s of death-march living is still pretty low. The chance of finding something you love doing? So much more achievable. Millions of dollars not required.

If you come to the realization that work in itself isn’t evil, you can stop living your life as a waterfall-planned software project too. No need to divide your timeline on earth into the false dichotomies of Sucky Work Era and Blissful Retirement Era. Instead, you can just fill your life with a balanced mix of activities that you can sustain for decades.”

Thanks David.  I needed that.

One of my takeaways from the Blogger Summit at the SCGS Jamboree last week was Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak’s revelation that all of a sudden, more and more genealogy enthusiasts are flocking to Facebook. I had already heard from DearMyrtle about the growth of a nascent genealogy community in Second Life. Two data points obviously don’t make a trend, but it would appear that family historians are approaching a tipping point with regard to online social networking — and are beginning to add it to their arsenal of research techniques. But are they really? And if so, in what kind of numbers?

Smart money is clearly being invested in genealogy-oriented online communities. Geni is perhaps the best-known current example (and my personal favorite), with its emphasis on building your family tree online by collaborating with your living relatives. Not long after it was launched, well-respected venture capital firm Charles River Ventures invested in Geni at a $100M valuation. Paul Allen at FamilyLink (nee World Vital Records) has long evangelized for genealogists to embrace the power of social networking and has seemingly built much of his company’s strategy accordingly. And no less an authority than Dick Eastman has backed up his belief that “social networking sites will be the ‘next big thing’ in online genealogy” by joining the advisory board of FamilyBuilder. But are these observations representative of mainstream genealogy enthusiasts’ behavior, or do they simply reflect the vision of early adopters?

In deciding on the feature set we wanted to incorporate in our upcoming beta release of Genlighten, we surveyed a group of 500 or so existing customers of ChicagoGenealogy.com, a genealogy lookup website focused on Cook County Illinois. Social networking was only mildly important to our 230 or so respondents:

Of course, this result might simply stem from a poorly-phrased survey question or the placement of social networking last in the list of possible responses.

Other more credible surveys mirror ours, however. In a December 2007 report entitled “Baby Boomers and Silver Surfers: Two Generations Online”, eMarketer found that only 18% of seniors age 50-60 were interested in online social networking. For those 60 and older, the number was even lower: 14%. Since these are the prime demographics for active involvement in genealogy, websites focusing on social networking for genealogists would appear to have an uphill climb to change existing behaviors and preferences. I believe that these companies will need patience, staying power, and a keen ear for customer insights if they are to ultimately be successful.

In the meantime, I have high hopes that sites like Geni, FamilyBuilder and their imitators can make headway introducing the Facebook generation to the joys of Family History. That in itself would be a tremendously praiseworthy accomplishment.

As for our strategy at Genlighten, we’re reluctant to jump on the social networking bandwagon just yet. If and when our customers indicate a strong desire for them, we may consider adding selected social networking features to the site. But for now, we’re focused on becoming a premier source for genealogical documents. If our users want to share the documents they get from us with others, we’ll try to make it easy for them, perhaps with something as simple as an “Export to Footnote” or “Add to your Geni tree” button.

Where do you stand with regard to Genealogy and Online Social Networks? Are you using Facebook, Second Life, Geni or FamilyBuilder in your research efforts? Have you managed to convince someone else to do so? Please leave a comment and let us know.

A questioner from the audience wants to know how to get info they want to share to bloggers. Dick points out the function of comments at the bottom of a blog post. He suggests she start her own. The questioner doesn’t want to, but just wants to e-mail her ideas to a blogger for them to post. Many on the panel indicate a willingness to do so, if the content fits.

More on comments. Steve admires the way Dick handles the negative comments he gets on his blog.

An audience member asks how to attract traffic to her blog. Shelly suggests focus and differentiation. Something unique, something niche. Before you think about traffic, think about your audience, and about what you’re going to address that’s different. If it is, people will come.

Randy suggests commenting on others’ blogs, participating in the Carnival of Genealogy. The genealogy blogger community is very accepting of newcomers. We know how hard it can be. Randy again mentions his visit with me at the booth yesterday. My gratified response that he had read my blog despite how new it is.

Dick returns to the topic of RSS. Has brought up the reader he uses. Demonstrates it to the group.

A questioner asks about which software to use to get a blog started. Steve demonstrates Blogger. Randy explains how Blogger hand-holds for you, gives you templates, let’s you have complete control, almost intuitive. Steve talks about WordPress and its various versions. George also uses Blogger. He notes that these sites have space limitations, which may be an issue for those with who put up a lot of images. Dick uses Typepad (which isn’t free). Suggests starting with a free site. Shelly suggests using colors on your blog with good contrast and readability.