Sunday, July 19, 2009

Direction?

I haven't had much time to blog lately. There are important things that require me to be completely present in the real world now and then. This has been a summer filled with such things, both good and bad. Life changing things.

But to get to a genealogical point, a crisis in research. Well, sort of. I had someone tell me that they had increased my file over 3000 people just by going to ancestry and collecting leaves. This was only a 2-line file. I worked for years to verify and find my people. My complete file is just over 3000. I was sitting and contemplating the damage done by such an act and thought, "I used to really do research". What a surprising thought out of nowhere. Being online has made me lazy about research. It's easy to become a 'name collector' in the online tree environment. The newbies coming up know only that environment. They are encouraged to just click here and the work is done for you. No matter that the data is wrong. Thomas MacEntee at his blog just recently posted "How Big Is It? Quality Over Quantity" hitting a nerve for me. The thought about my research and my goals for my work has been in the back of my mind now for a while. Every day it pops up to be ruminated over some more. I am not sure where it is leading me.

Also there is the mess with GenealogyWise, the Ning driven network site belonging to WorldVitalRecords (a $$ site). Not a wise start at all, it seems. I have gotten many invites, including one surprisingly from the site itself. But I am exhausted by keeping sites going and spending so much time trying to keep up. We all need community and I certainly enjoy it but how much is too much? I really like Facebook and a few others and would like to keep them. So perhaps a small, manageable network will fill the need. At any rate, I was trampled in the (what I believe was an engineered) early stampede to the site as it was not even open at the time. No one waited to see what it was before the great mass joining. So I decided to watch. Now there is a rather useless mess of groups of every imaginable kind that I, as yet, cannot see being helpful. Perhaps I am blind to the direction this is going. At any rate I am rather happy I sat it out. I am referring to Terry Thornton and the problems with posts being taken down when they don't go the way of the GW owner. On top of that I was unable to get Terrys blog to load today. It has been removed too. I hope Mr. Thornton shut it down himself, and not GW with Blogger. Though it is beyond my understanding why he would remove so much data. If he didn't, perhaps after this post my time is limited here as well. Whatever the answer to the disappearance of the blogs, there is a distinct odor in the air.

The whole mess just emphasizes to me the need for me to decide and weed out the things I do not find useful in my quest to find my family. A plan and focus on one line might be in order. All those old goals need to be brought out and dusted off.

Twitter isn't as helpful as I had hoped. And I am interested in more than just genealogy. I don't see how I can 'talk' to one interest without it going out to all. That is not good. Perhaps the AdobeAir programs such as TweetDeck and TWhirl do that, and I have them on my computer, but I don't want to expend the huge resources that I found they need to run. So I haven't learned to use them. Slows down the whole process. Firefox is such a memory hog it is hard to run anything as hungry as it (Firefox is an addiction). In Twitterfox you have no options. So I need to figure out how to work with it or settle on just reading them. Very interesting tweets though. I do enjoy reading.

4 comments:

Bill West said...

Sheri,
Terry removed the blogs himself.
I've talked with him by email about it.There's been sort of a discussion of it over at my West in New England blog.

Gayle Gresham said...

Sheri, you wrote a thought-provoking post. Direction is important and something I constantly have to evaluate as I run off after every exciting opportunity. Your comments about Twitter interested me. I have a lot of interests and tweet about all of them. I hope people of any certain interest group don't hold that against me. That's what I enjoy about Twitter - reading a "slice of life" from interesting people and picking up so many great tips and ideas.

Virginia Hill said...

I've found that it's a lot easier adding people into the family tree than taking them out. Looking back I wish I had never imported GEDCOMs into my tree file. There is no surefire way to get back to my own researched individuals. So I've spent ages double checking and adding sources. I would much rather have more information/sources on fewer individuals.

In the social explosion on the Internet, it's just too easy to get caught up in signing up for new sites. I've never felt comfortable in real social situations or conversation. Groups of any kind are difficult for me. It's great socializing but it can take precious time from research and other projects. How come it's so difficult to keep things in balance?

I wish you well in your real AND virtual life!

GeneaGeek said...

re: "I don't see how I can 'talk' to one interest without it going out to all".
Not sure if this is what you mean but doesn't the 'direct message' option allow this?

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