social network

Genealogy and the Power of Social Media

~ randyaa ~ 2 Comments

It’s (semi) official. I share a bloodline with George W Bush. He’s my 19th cousin once removed. So. Very. Strange.

I’ve been using Geni for quite a while now after becoming slightly interested in Genealogy. I’m not sure what piked my interest to begin with, but I know what solidified it and it’s probably no news to you. Seems I might be descendant of royalty (ie: King Edward II aka LongShanks). I still haven’t found the direct link (just some woman named Mary listed as a ‘Descendent of’) to King Edward II but although unproven as of yet, I can trace back to the Aldrich Immigrant George Aldrich with a certain level of certainty.

Geni has been running a promotion recently for a 14 day free Pro account trial. About 2 weeks ago I figured what the heck, why not? I went for it and HOLY COW! The power of social media has truly been revealed to me.

family-statsOne of the key features of a Pro account is the ability to find similar profiles to those in your tree. I figured the best way to go about this is to go back as far as I can and see if there are any matches. Naturally I used the immigrant George Aldrich (born 1605) whom I also happened to recently find the last will and testament of. Wow did I find matches. Over 20 of them in fact, and after requesting merges with those that appeared to be identical matches, my tree began to grow at an astounding rate. You see, once you merge with someone else who is active, they begin requesting merges with others, who request merges with others and eventually you’ll likely know how you’re connected to everyone. Geni‘s own slogan is after all “Everyone’s Related”.

After two weeks of this (I’m now lacking a Pro account since the trial is up) my tree is ginormous. To be specific I’m now connected to over 26 million people (living and deceased) with over 5 thousand direct ancestors alone. It’s insane and the number keeps going up and up and up.

Sometimes all this connectedness and user driven content does have its downsides though. I just found out that George W Bush is my 19th Cousin Once Removed. We share blood. ugh. Unfortunately now that I lost my Pro Account I can no longer view the ‘path’ between us since he’s too distant and not a direct ancestor. They usually look a little something like this though:

william-raby

This is all very cool and I’ve learned a ton about my family’s history. What’s really neat is you find other people out there that are more interested and have more information than you do. This is certainly one area that Social Media excels at.

If you even have a tiny interest in this stuff at all I highly recommend using Geni.com to get started, even if it’s just to get your immediate family into the site so others can find you. You never know, you might just inherit England.

Social Network Update Overload

~ randyaa ~ 2 Comments

Social Network GraphDifferent Audiences see you in different places. I use lots of different services and for different reasons. For the purpose of this post I’ll use only Twitter Facebook and my blog. The number of people that see my ‘tweets’ on Twitter is significantly less than the number of people who see my blog posts. The number of people who see my blog posts directly is significantly less than those who see my Facebook updates. For this reason I have created synchronization points.

Facebook automatically imports my blog posts whenever there’s a new one. At the same time I use TwitterSync to synchronize my twitter updates with my Facebook status. The number of people my posts reach is far greater on Facebook than it is on my blog alone. Many of my friends on Facebook are not tech savvy and therefor are not into feed reading yet. In fact many of them rely on sites like Facebook to get them updates.

You probably think (like the Technology Evangelist) that this means that the people that subscribe to all these services are suffering from Randy Aldrich information overload. If you’re subscribed to each of the 3 different services without any modifications you’re probably right.

I suffered from the same problem. Some of my friends have many services and end up duplicating their content in more than one just like I do. Unfortunately sites like Facebook do not allow you to ‘ignore imported posts’ from certain users. Until that ability exists in the services which you use I suggest making use of Yahoo Pipes.

What I did was create a Pipe that imports my Facebook notes as well as several friend’s blogs. I then use the unique operator to weed out the duplicated posts and that’s it. It is really that simple. Simply combine all the feeds you need to filter through, and utilize the unique operator to filter out the duplicates.

Your Music Your Way

~ randyaa ~ 3 Comments

Anywhere.FM LogoI read about Anywhere.FM a while back and even added it to my Daily Notes. I never took the time to look into it until today. Holy crap I wish I had! It’s an awesome service. It lets you upload your entire music collection and listen to it anywhere you want. At the moment there is no storage limitation but the site is still in beta so they say that might change. I was originally hesitant when I heard about it because I thought it was going to be a service you had to run on your computer at home to share your library over the web. Since I have recently gotten rid of my home server I wasn’t looking forward to running another service.

There is also a client side application which allows you to sync your entire iTunes library. They claim to be working on a winamp and Windows Media Player syncing as well.

Don’t worry you’re not stuck listening to your own music either. What would a website be today without a built in social network? Anywhere.FM is no different. They allow you to add friends and listen to their music and playlists. They also have a very large repository music available for free. Plenty of raw music for you to discover. You can even browse other people’s music and play that as well. I’m not sure whether you get access to all of everyone’s music or if it has to be shared somehow but at this point I’m very excited.

Apparently this is all legal thanks to paying royalties to the artist through ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, the three performing rights organizations. I’m sure the artists are happy about this because they get paid for songs which have already been paid for assuming you actually do own the rights to the music you’re playing. It’s just paying income tax and sales tax.

This leads me into another topic… I’ve gone legit. That’s right I’ve started weeding out my questionable music and getting legit copies of music I really enjoy. That being said I currently have a lot of whole albums. That has stopped. I’m now only getting the songs I really want. I think the desire to obtain a whole album is a hold over from the days of purchasing CD’s. Its time to move into the 21st century and only pay for what I want. It will increase my overall quality of music as well. To that end I’ve also begun a weeding out process on my Ipod. This weekend I went from somewhere around 4-5k songs down to only 300.

Ironically the very thing that caused me to get into this legit kick is something not so legit. About 2 weeks ago Nick let me in on a loophole for free iTune songs from facebook. It took some time but I managed to build up 250 free songs before they closed the hole. Yay for me :).