Genealogy and Tech: Google and Ancestry

Google Reader disappears on Monday

As they announced back in March the Google Reader app will be retired on July 1st. At the time I said I was going to try NetVibes and TheOldReader and choose the one I liked better. I chose TheOldReader very quickly. I was even very impressed when TheOldReader discovered where some old blogs had gone and moved to.

I've seen an uptick the past few days in people asking for suggestions. Not too surprising. I'm usually in the group that waits to the last minute. Many people are recommending Feedly. However, Feedly still doesn't have a version for Internet Explorer. As I said back in March, I hate IE, but I am restricted to using it for a good portion of my time. I have also heard some complaints that Feedly doesn't have a 'search' function. TheOldReader does have a search function. On the other hand, TheOldReader doesn't have a mobile app. This isn't an issue for me, as I don't like reading blog entries on my iphone. I prefer the larger screen.

Correction: TheOldReader has opened up their API and there is an iPhone/iPad mobile app that works with it. Feeddler. I will need to test it out, even though I think I will still prefer using a computer screen.

While there are other options, depending upon your OS and Browser needs, TheOldReader and Feedly seem to be the favorites.

Ancestry

For quite awhile Ancestry.com has been maintaining two separate search engines, one they called New Search, and the other Old Search. They announced yesterday that they are going to stop doing that. But unlike Coca Cola, they aren't retiring New Search. 

An email they sent out yesterday to Old Search users:

Dear John, [I suspect the name was different on different emails] 

Ancestry.com is continuing our efforts to improve the search experience across Ancestry.com and will be making changes to our search functionality in the upcoming months. Some features will be added and some will be discontinued. As part of the 2% of our subscribers that use the old search function on the site, we know that you are passionate about the search experience on Ancestry.com and we are reaching out to you to get input on potential improvements. We hope you will take the opportunity to share your insights and feedback on our plans. 

To identify which areas of the experience we should focus on this year, we have drawn on customer input, usage data, usage patterns and our old search function for inspiration. From all of that, we are looking at making your time on Ancestry.com more productive by improving these areas of the search experience in 2013:

• More relevant search results with the best results at the top

• Easier refining and control of your search results

• Keeping a better history of the work you have done

• Publishing more new content and more corrections to existing content

• Performance improvements to return results faster

As we begin to make these improvements, we will no longer maintain two separate search systems for the site. Maintaining two systems limits the resources we can use to make improvements and increases the complexity of every improvement we try to make. Additionally, continuing to maintain the two systems limits our ability to direct more investment into other areas like adding more record collections and correcting existing collections.Based on that, as a part of the work this year we will be bringing together the two search experiences into a single search experience on Ancestry.com. We hope to bring forward the best features of both the old and new search systems into the consolidated experience to facilitate the transition for our users and to improve the overall search experience. We expect to discontinue the old search function as a separate experience within the next 6 months.As a user of the old search feature, we wanted to give you advance notice and let you influence the changes we are making in search. Please take this survey to share your feedback and ideas on key features to improve.Best regards, 

The Ancestry.com Product Team

---

As a former computer programmer, their explanation makes perfect sense, and I am surprised both search options lasted as long as they did.

If they do combine New Search with the best 'features' of Old Search, I think many of the 2% will be happy. I find the layout of the search results in New Search less appealing, and more difficult to navigate. There are complaints that wildcard searches more often return error messages on New Search, and when they do work, yield less complete results than Old Search.  As a former computer programmer I will state, working correctly isn't a 'feature' it's a 'requirement.' But if Old Search ceases to exist, there won't be a way for people to easily discover the results are incomplete.

Other Commentary on the Upcoming Retirement of Old Search

• CowHampshire: Ancestry.com - Why is a Good Idea Going the Way of the Flash Mob
• Genea-Musings: Ancestry.com to Retire "Old Search" Capability
• West in New England: Confession of a Genealogical Fuddyduddy Revisited
• Begin with 'Craft': Time to Suck it Up and Say 'Goodbye' to Old Search
• GeneaBloggers: Ancestry.com Changes Search F unctionality and Removes Old Search
• GenealogyInsider: Ancestry.com's 2% Speak Up
• British GENES: Ancestry's Old Search to Go in Six Months
• Gene Notes: I'm a 2 Percenter
• Reflections from the Fence: The 2 % Rant, NOT Feeling Special, And After All It Is ALL About ME!
• Nutfield Genealogy: Flash Blog Mob
• Genea-Musings: Comparing "Old Search" and "New Search" Results at Ancestry.com

Google Reader Alternatives: First Glance

I've begun looking at various alternate RSS Feed Readers recommended by various Tech sites, such as Macgasm, LifeHacker, and CNET.

Feedly: Has different apps for iOS, Android, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. No version for Internet Explorer. I don't like Internet Explorer, but I am restricted to using it at work. I wouldn’t be able to catch up on blog posts during my lunch hour. (Well…sure I could…on my phone. But it’s easier to read blog posts on a large screen.)

NewsBlur: When I first looked at NewsBlur the evening of March 13th, it said that its free version had a limit of 64 feeds. By March 14th, that number had decreased to 12. The decrease could be temporary, there is no information on their blog. Regardless, that's too low for me. Their premium version is only $12/year.  If there were no other viable choices, I’d consider it. But with worthwhile free options, paying even $12/year is too much.

TheOldReader: Created when Google Reader made some changes that upset some users, it was constructed to look and feel exactly like Google Reader. Currently, due to server overload, they are limiting the number of users who can import their feeds at one time, so I haven’t had a chance to really test this out, but it looks promising. Especially for users who don’t like getting used to new things. Update: Was able to upload my subscription file the evening of March 14th, but received a message that it could be several hours before the subscriptions were imported, as 5482 users were in the import queue ahead of me.

Google Currents: Only has iOS and Android versions. If you only follow your subscriptions on a phone or tablet, this might be a good alternative. Until Google decides it no longer wishes to maintain it either.

NetVibes: The only place so far I have been able to import my Google Reader feeds. Their interface is more complicated than Google Reader. They have two views: Reader and Widget. Reader is similar to Google Reader, though I haven't figured out the best way to bookmark articles to return to them. Widget view allows you to add additional functionality similar to an iGoogle page. (iGoogle is being retired in November of 2013)

Pulse: This seems to be one of the more popular 'visual' readers. For those who like to view their blogs in a newspaper/magazine style. It is my opinion the more blogs one subscribes to, the less useful this becomes. It was announced yesterday that LinkedIn is close to buying Pulse. Not sure how that will impact the application (or the networking site).

Currently, my plan is to test out NetVibes and TheOldReader and decide which one I prefer. If someone suggests I try something not listed above, I'll consider it.

Another factor some might be wondering about is how likely are the above websites to be around a year from now? I have no ability to measure that for any of the options above. Especially not Google Currents. Google Reader has been in existence since 2005, but Google has been doing a lot of 'spring cleaning' recently, and making it clear they are willing to abandon applications they view as unsuccessful. (And many people would not have included Google Reader in that list.)

Survey Update: Possible Bad News for 70% of My Readers

Five days ago I posted a simple survey, asking my readers how they followed the posts on my blog.



70% of the current votes are going towards using an RSS reader, such as Google Reader.

While there are multiple RSS readers, Google Reader is one of the more popular ones.
According to Google Reader's statistics, over 100 people are subscribers to this blog.

As popular as it is, today Google announced it is retiring it.
As of July 1st, 2013, Google Reader will no longer exist.

I am a user of Google Reader myself, and would appreciate suggestions on other Readers to try.

Lifehacker provides some suggestions

Surname Ngrams

Google has an interesting feature: The Google Ngram Viewer. An  n-gram references the frequency a phoneme, word, or phrase occurs across a span of text or speech. The Google Ngram Viewer allows you to search through Google Books across a span of years for a series of terms, and it will graph the rate of appearance for those terms.

 

I thought it might be interesting to graph the frequency for several of my surnames. I chose the eight surnames of my great great grandparents. However, after the inital attempt, I removed 'Deutsch' from the list since it dwarfed the rest of the surnames. Terms that are relatively similar in frequency work best in these graphs.

 

Below is the chart for Cruvant, Blatt, Feinstein, Newmark, Vanevery, Denyer and Lichtman. The span of years I chose was 1900-2000. I selected English language texts. Below the graph are links to the actual Google Books search results for each term graphed for particular decades.

 

(Click to enlarge)

If you enlarge the graph, and look carefully, you'll notice that the blue line for Cruvant appears briefly in the 1950s. This is due single-handedly to my cousin, Bernard Cruvant, who got some press for his psychiatrical work.  The surname Feinstein definitely grew in use in the last half of the century, going from least frequent to most. I was at first a little surprised "Denyer" wasn't more common, but I have to go back a couple centuries for that particular spelling of the English word, for someone who denies, to be prevalent.  And I hadn't noticed the search was 'case-sensitive.' When I plotted 'Denyer' vs 'denyer' it was clear that in the 1700s the religious term made several appearances. If I hadn't limited the seach to English texts, the Blatt surname would likely have increased in frequency significantly.

Some reviews I found online raised questions about the accuracy of the results.
1) The amount of texts from particular time periods are likely uneven, does Google weigh this into the equation?

I believe the answer must be, "yes." The Y-axis is a percentage, not number of occurrences. They claim each point on the graph is the frequency for a given year.

Of course, the type of material that has been scanned will make a difference. (Fiction, scholastic journals, reference works, etc) I suspect the diversity of digitized material decreases the further back one goes.

2) Optical character recognition can easily get confused. One example is that in older texts the letter 's' looks a lot like the modern 'f''. 

3) If a particular term has had multiple spellings over time that will also, naturally, impact the graph, as I pointed out with the surname, Denyer.

Correcting a Serious Mistake

I’ve uploaded parts of my genealogy database to a few different websites. If I am going to make the tree public, I’ve naturally always trimmed it a bit. My standard procedure is to delete every record of a living person. Most of the websites have privacy mechanisms that obscure information for living individuals, but which information they obscure sometimes varies, and technology can always fail. So no information is better, in my opinion, than obscured information. What the software doesn't know, it can't reveal to the world.

But a recent occurrence made me realize this isn’t always enough. A cousin contacted me, (rightfully) upset because some private information appeared on an entry at Wikitree. How did this happen? I had placed information about a living person within the source notes for their ancestor.

I actually do this a lot, but not to the extent in this case. I copy and paste obituary notices all the time for the individuals in my database. And those obituaries usually contain the names of children and grandchildren. However, few would complain about their name appearing in the obituary of their grandparent.

This lapse was a lot more serious. I had copied and pasted an entire email from a cousin, detailing names, and dates of birth, for several generations. I naturally pasted it into the notes for the original ancestor, and entered ‘see notes for X’ in the notes for the later generations. This email was my ‘source’ for much of the information; it made sense for me to copy and paste it into the database. I just forgot I had done this when I uploaded it to WikiTree. To cap it off, the email also contained a couple email addresses, and a postal address. (This contact information has now been deleted from my database. It didn't need to be there as part of the source material.)

At least WikiTree is a Wiki – making quick edits easy. Within minutes of getting the email, I had removed the text of the email from the profile. Of course, as is standard for the Wiki software, the entire text gets moved to “Change History.”

I emailed the WikiTree staff and asked them if they were able to override the settings and delete the Change History. I learned this isn’t possible. The only solution would be to delete the individual’s profile and then recreate it manually. I had no problem with this solution (in my email I had actually told the WikiTree staff that I would do this if they couldn't) but I didn’t want to do it immediately.

Why not? Google had already cached the private information. [I suspect this is how my cousin discovered the private information was there - through a search on their name.] It can take weeks, or months, before Google updates a cache, and it is my understanding that it can take longer if the page no longer exists. WikiTree names pages with the “Surname-XX “format, where XX is a number. I knew deleting and recreating the profile would likely generate a different number, and thus a different page from Google’s perspective.

I didn’t want to wait weeks or months, though, so I conducted a search to see if I could manually speed up Google’s process, and I learned I could.

In order to remove a cached page you need to provide
1) The URL of the page you want removed
2) A word that appears on the cached page that no longer appears there.

This process will not work to update a page where you have only *added* information. It is precisely intended for those times where information is deleted for reasons of privacy or legality. My situation fit perfectly.

I submitted the request in the evening, and by noon the next day the cache was gone.

I then deleted the profile, along with the change history, and recreated the profile manually with only the information I had intended to make public.

My next step was to remove the cache from Bing. They have a similar form to fill out, however, they require the original page to no longer exist before they remove the cache. Which is why I deleted the profile first. They also require the form to be filled out by someone associated with the website, and specifically ask for an email contact, so I sent the information to the WikiTeam, and they submitted it for me.  Three days later, the cache has been removed. (Since Yahoo uses Bing's search engine, this deleted it at Yahoo as well.)

I suspect the information may be cached on some minor search engines, however, a search at DogPile and MetaCrawler (which both search multiple search engines simultaneously) no longer produces a cached result. Any other search engines will update their information in their normal process of events.

I am very thankful to the WikiTree team for the quick assistance they provided me in dealing with this situation.

Who Will Google Kill This Time?

Disclaimer:
Back in June of 2009 I predicted, "Google Wave is Coming; It's Undertow will Claim at least One Victim."
My record on predictions has historically been pretty lousy.

***

I've been playing on Google's new social network, Google Plus (or Google+ or G+), for 4 days now.  Lots of people are talking about what it will replace.  And since we like violent imagery, the word 'killer' gets bandied about.

Twitter-Killer?

Certainly a lot of the same chat that goes on with Twitter I see at Google+.  Currently there isn't anything to compare with Twitter's hashtags. Without something of this nature, Twitter survives.  As someone who has been on Twitter for awhile, and uses it, one of the cool things about Twitter is the ability to use hashtags to find other people talking about the same topics.

Google+'s Sparks could be a replacement for hashtags, if they turned it inward, and allowed you to search for public posts.  Currently, however, Sparks is only focused outward, yielding Google search results for specific terms.

Of course, Google is the "King of Search" and Google+ is currently only in "Field-Test" mode.  Many have predicted that they will integrate search within the network and allow us to find posts by keyword.  At that point, I do wonder what distinguishes Twitter to allow it to coexist.  Especially since I feel a large percentage of Twitter users are the type of individual who are likely to sign up for Google+.

It's possible people will keep posting to Twitter, posting the same status updates to both places, as they post them to Facebook and Twitter now.  As soon as Google releases the G+ API, there will be apps to make this simple.  But I see myself already losing interest in Twitter, and the only thing keeping me there is the hashtags.

Tumblr-Killer?

For those unfamiliar with Tumblr, it is a blogging platform excelling at the sharing, and resharing, of media (images, video, and audio).  G+ definitely does this very well.

However, like Twitter, Tumblr thrives on hashtags.  So until Google+ integrates an internal search engine, it's safe.  However, once it does, I suspect use of Tumblr will drop as users realize their posts will get more views on Google+.

Facebook-Killer?

So far I have found only two things Facebook can do that Google+ can't.

1) Games.  [Many will see this as a plus in favor of Google]
2) Event managing

While many people use Facebook to schedule events, and invite their friends, you can't do that YET with Google+.  However, all signs indicate that Google intends to integrate Google+ with as many of its products as possible.  And Google Calendar is one of its products.  I don't know when it's coming, but I think it's a safe bet that they will release some sort of event management function.

However, regardless of whether Social Network A and B can do the same things, and regardless of which one does it better, a Social Network must contain one essential thing.  The People With Whom You Wish to Network.

The First Adopters of Google+ are highly extolling its virtues.  But if we can't convince our less techy friends, and family members to join us, we will need to maintain both a Facebook and a Google+ account.  At least we will if we feel the need to continue to 'network' with both groups.

I ask myself the crucial question: When will I delete my Facebook account?

After less than a week, still in Field-Test invite only stage, almost all the fellow Genealogists who I networked with on Facebook are on G+.  I have 95 'friends' on Facebook who are in my 'Genealogy' list.  I have 71 individuals in my Genealogy circle on Google+.

Along with:

• A handful of close friends
• No family (excepting my fiancee)
• No fellow high school or college alums.

I need to hand out gold stars to the Genealogy community.  Especially when the stereotype doesn't fall within the 18-40 male geek demographic one expects to be "First Adopters" of new technology.  Of course, online genealogists are used to 'trying out' new database websites for their research.  Just because a large number of us are anxious to see what's going on, doesn't mean we'll all stay.

One member of the genealogy community has gotten a fair amount of press for his G+ activity.  Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com.  Using Ancestry's census statistics, and surname counts on G+, he estimated G+ would surpass 10,000,000 users today.  Google has neither confirmed nor denied his estimates.

I find myself asking other crucial questions:  
Why did I join Facebook originally? 
What purpose does a social network fill for me?

If my family wants to talk to me, they either pick up a phone, or send me an email.
If my close friends wish to talk to me, they either pick up a phone, or send me an email.

What Facebook has done for me is get me in touch with people I had lost track of from earlier periods in my life (school, former jobs, etc).

I see the following progression of events for me:
1) I will stop posting new status posts on Facebook.  I predict that happens now. I'm not including occasional posts to Facebook reminding people - hey, if you want to see what's going on with me, look at my public G+ posts, or join up, and I'll add you to my circles.
2) I will only use Facebook to read (and comment) on other posts.
3) I will delete everyone on Facebook that has a Google+ account, and is clearly using it.
4) I will monitor my usage of Facebook.

I predict, before the first snowfall this winter, I will delete my Facebook account.

However, I foresee Google+ and Facebook coexisting.  There will be more then enough people who prefer each network. Some people will feel the need to be on both.  Others will make their choices.

Everything is New Again - backing up Gmail

In January of 2008 Charter Communications accidentally deleted thousands of email accounts.  In December of 2006 Google accidentally had deleted 60 gmail accounts.  Here's a January 2008 post of mine explaining how to backup gmail with Pop3.

Recently a Google glitch disabled 150,000 gmail accounts.  Mashable posted a backup method using some software called Gmail Backup.

However, it is important to note...Google didn't lose the email permanently.  As they have explained

To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.

 Google's offline tape backup is very reassuring to this customer.  I am not one of the .02% of Gmail customers who woke up a couple days ago to empty accounts.  You would have heard from me if I had been.  While it may be possible to imagine a natural disaster that might impact both the backup servers and the tape backup simultaneously, I am comforted that they are not relying completely on digital storage.

Tuesday Tech Tip: Google's "Site:" command is not always better

Kerry Scott over at the Clue Wagon discusses Google's site search function.

1. Go to the Google homepage.
2. Type in site:[name of site] [keywords] For example, if you wanted to search for mentions of Glenbeulah on this site, you’d type in site:cluewagon.com Glenbeulah.

As she points out, this can be a very useful function for searching websites that don't have a search function.  However, she concludes:

I almost never use a site’s native search box, because I prefer the consistent results of doing it this way.

Be careful.  Google doesn't index every page of every website.  And the pages it indexes, it doesn't always capture every word.  In many cases, if a blog or website provides a native search function, it will actually yield more results than Google will.

Below are the Google results searching my non-genealogy blog for the word 'Napoleon'.  It yields 8 results.

Here are the results if you use the Wordpress search box on the blog.  There are 9 results.  The entry Google missed contains the word 'Napoleonic.'  That's only part of the reason Google missed it.

Two identical searches, conducted about 3 minutes apart, with different results.  So Google's results aren't even consistent.  However, even if it were consistent, Wordpress's ability to find different word-endings of the same word makes it a superior method.


What about for this blog? 
Here I use Blogger, which is owned and operated by Google.  Does this make a difference?

When I use Blogger's search function on this blog, and search for Horton, I get 17 results.

Google gives me 68 results.  This at first glance seems a marked improvement.  However, the word "Horton" appears on my blog's sidebar, and Google's search function can't tell the difference between the sidebar and the blog entry.  Theoretically, Google should return all 925 entries as hits, if it counts the sidebar.  Not counting the entries in the results that only appear there because of the sidebar, I think there are 11 results.  I don't feel like spending the time figuring out which entries it missed, but I'm pretty sure it did miss some.  And the extra chaff it provides makes it more difficult to find the wheat.

What about using the site: command at Google's blogsearch?

This provides interesting results.  Blogsearch finds all 17 entries for Horton (and only these 17 entries.)  Google's Blogsearch understands the difference between sidebar and entry, while Google's main search site doesn't.  And (maybe) because Blogger is a Google product, they've indexed Blogger blogs better.

My search for Napoleon at Blogsearch yields only two results.

This isn't an adequate study, but I think I might avoid using blogsearch for non-blogger blogs.

Blogger and Wordpress blogs make up a sizable number of the blogs out there, and I am quite happy with the results their database search functions yield.  Google's results are inconsistent, and incomplete. But if you are at a site that doesn't have a search function, Google's sitesearch command is useful to remember.  It's better than nothing.

Follow Friday: Usenet/Google Groups

Usenet began in the 1980s as a collection of discussion groups, mostly for college students and staff on any topic the users decided they wanted to talk about. Anything without limitations. Whenever a quorum decided a new topic was needed, it was added.

A company called DejaNews began organizing the Usenet archives in the late 1990s, and Google bought them in 2001 and formed Google Groups. Google Groups serves as both an archive going back to 1981 and a continuation of all the discussion groups. (This has frightened many former college students who began to ask, "Everything I posted there is now available for potential employers - or my kids! - to read? Forever?" Google used to provide a method of claiming old posts and deleting them, but that help page is no longer there, and they only explain how to delete more recent posts to Google Groups.)

A few of the groups that might be of of obvious interest to genealogists and family historians: Alt.Obituaries, and two dozen groups or so under the heading Soc.Genealogy.

Of course you can search all groups at once on the main page, including newer ones created under the auspices of Google Groups. Just be forewarned. In the search results, before clicking on something, take a look at what the title of the discussion-group is. This will likely give you a clue as to what posts you are likely to find in that group. This could change your mind on whether or not to read the post.

This post was adapted from a post back in August of 2007.

Google Transliteration

Back in December Google released Google Transliteration, making it easy to convert Roman alphabet languages to 17 other language character sets.  I commented that Hebrew wasn't one of the 17, and I theorized it might somewhat appropriately be the 18th.  (18 having mystical significance).

Today Google announced the addition of five more character sets, and Hebrew is one of them.  We'll just say that it was the 18th.

Here's my surname in Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek characters
נומרק
يومارك 
Νεωμαρκ  

It's not perfect.  When I type in my great grandmother's surname, "Cruvant," and ask for Hebrew characters, I am given

סרוואנט 

Which would actually be equivalent to Sruvant, but there's no way for me to expect a computer to know I meant a hard-C.  When I enter 'Kruvant', I get the Hebrew spelling I've seen on gravestones and elsewhere:

קרובנט 

The Beeswax on Google Buzz

With Google Buzz, Google has entered the Social Networking foray. (Again. It's been here in the past - Orkut and Wave.)

Here's their video explaining stuff



What follows is a summary of what I have figured out and learned in the past 24 hours.

Some important notes regarding privacy and usage:

• It's being rolled out automatically to anyone with a Google Gmail account. If you have a Gmail account, and don't have Buzz yet, you should soon. I'm not sure how long the rollout is supposed to take. If you don't have a Gmail account, they're free. (Google is devious.)

• Users can syndicate their Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and Blog feeds (pretty much anything with an RSS feed) so that it appears in their Buzz 'stream'.

• Those with a current Gmail account are automatically set to 'follow' a grouping of their most frequent contacts. This has upset some, though it is easy to 'unfollow', and no one gets notified if you do.

• Those you are following, and those following you, are listed by default on your Google Profile. For some, this Google Profile is searchable on the web. (You have to have intentionally set it up this way for this to be the case. Here's my Google Profile if you want to see what one looks like.) Some have proclaimed this shouldn't be the default. But I believe it is the default on Twitter, and I haven't heard people complain about that. Of course, for most people, their email contacts are a much more diverse group than their Twitter followers. Regardless, you can edit your profile, and turn this feature off. Once turned off, no one will see your list of followers, or followed. Not even others on that list. (I have two gmail accounts, and thus two Buzz accounts, and have been able to verify this.)

• When someone replies to your "Buzz" (aka: Status Update), this reply appears in your Gmail inbox, as well as in your "Buzz" folder. This also happens if you comment on someone else's buzz, and someone comments after you. It's not immediately obvious how to turn this 'off.' You actually can't. But you can set up a mail filter that automatically archives these notifications, skipping the inbox.

• There is a Mobile version of Buzz. It is currently available for iPhone and Google Android. The version for Blackberry says 'coming soon.' I have a Blackberry, so I can't tell you anything about the mobile version yet. (grumble.)

• For whatever reason, if you decide you don't want any part of Google Buzz, you can scroll down to the very bottom of your Gmail screen, and in tiny print you will see a link that says "Turn off Buzz."

What are my initial thoughts?

There are a couple things that are very appealing about Buzz.

• It's Facebook without Farmville, Farkle, or F'in MaFia! -- It can provide the status update, social networking capability without the distraction of the Facebook Apps.

• Syndication -- It's easy to syndicate your current social networking feeds so they appear in Buzz. (Of course, you can't syndicate your Buzz feed so they appear elsewhere. Why would Google want to offer that functionality?)

But right now, there are very few people using it. Of course, it's still being rolled out. It's a baby compared to the Twitter, Facebook and MySpace giants. And Google's decision to add it automatically to every gmail account was brilliant. I suspect there are many gmail users who have carefully avoided the social networking phenomenon who will now wake up and find themselves addicted. (I'll repeat what I said earlier. Google is devious.)

If you do find yourself using Google Buzz, and wish to follow me, you can just click on the "find people" link and search for my real name. Currently there will be five results. Two have photographs of me next to them. As I stated above, I have two Buzz accounts. The one that says "Writer, St. Louis, MO" is my personal account, and is linked to my twitter under the username Gavroche, and soon should be linked to my non-genealogy blog. The one that doesn't say this is linked to this blog, and my twitter under the username TransDutch. I've been careful not to duplicate feeds so those who want can follow both and not get duplicate items in their 'Buzz stream."

Update 2/12: Google has already made updates to address some of the privacy concerns

Google Storage Space

I have two gmail accounts, each with 7.4 GB of storage, and growing.

One form of backup I use on documents is mailing the document from one account to the other.

This works for most documents, but gmail does have a 25 MB limit on file size. When you are scanning documents at large resolutions, I've found it's not too difficult to go over 25 MB.

Google has announced that Google Documents will soon allow you 1 GB of additional storage space for files. (These files won't be converted into Google Doc, Spreadsheet, or Presentation format -- it's simply storage space.) And if you need more space, additional GB will be fairly inexpensive.

The file size limitation will be 250 MB.

****

We're happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to upload and access your files from any computer -- all you need is an Internet connection.

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.

Google Alerts - What it Does, and Doesn't Do

Legacy News (the news blog for the genealogy software company) on December 17th wrote How to Create a Google Alert

By creating a Google Alert, whenever Google finds your word or phrase that you are interested in, Google will automatically send you an email. For example, I am searching for an ancestor....If, today, I don't find anything relevant, I can create a Google Alert for his name, and then work on other things, ... Then, if someone publishes new information to a website that Google finds, I'll get an email with a direct link to the new page.

I've seen this tip on a few other blogs since then. It is very misleading in a crucial manner. In my Year in Review entry I linked to my July post on this topic, but it bears repeating since several people seem to be misled.

To quote the second question and answer from the Frequently Asked Questions page for Google Alerts (emphasis added):

2. What are the different types of alerts I can sign up for?

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'.

* A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
* A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
* A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
* A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
* A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
* A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

How often do you find that one hit you're searching for on the third, fifth, or 10th page in the Google Search results? Google Alerts will NEVER alert you to that hit, unless it makes it to the first two pages (twenty results) for a web search. If you're using a News Alert or Blog Alert, it will only tell you if it makes the first ten results.

So if you set up those Google Alerts and think everything is done for you and you never need to search Google manually again --- you're wrong. Unless you're OK with only knowing about the top 10 or 20 results. If that's all you want, then Google Alerts is perfect for the job.

A simple reminder

When you find something online that is useful to your genealogy research -- don't assume it will remain there to return to and review at a later date. If it's downloadable, download it and save it to your hard drive. If not, copy and paste it into a word document.

This may be easy to remember with personal, educational, or other amateur websites. But don't forget even the big websites can be forced to take things down by lawsuits, etc.

Google has faced some recent lawsuits over their Google Books project. I'm not positive it's related, but I have discovered that several books that used to be "Full View" (and downloadable in PDF form) are no longer available except in "Snippet View" at best, and in some cases no preview at all.

These are all books published prior to 1920, most prior to 1900, so it's not an issue of whether or not they were in the public domain. I'm not entirely certain what the issue was.

Happy Holidays from Google

Google announces they will be providing free Wi-Fi at 47 airports across the country from today through January 15th. (And on Virgin America flights)

From their website:

When you’re traveling this holiday season, you can enjoy free WiFi at 47 participating airports and on every Virgin America flight. Just bring a WiFi-enabled laptop or mobile device and stay connected to family and friends for free while you travel now through January 15, 2010.

Photo Contest - Win cool prizes

Starting Monday, November 16, 2009, you'll be able to win prizes by submitting a photo of yourself using the WiFi in any participating airport or on a Virgin America flight. In addition to being able to win great stuff, we'll feature winning photos on this website.

Tech Tip: Viewing your Blogger Images

If your blog is created by Blogger, you may have wished there was a way to easily browse through the images you have uploaded for your posts. Or perhaps you wished for an easy way to display the images elsewhere.

You may not have realized that if you use Blogger (whether using blogspot, or a custom domain) all the images you have uploaded are available for your private viewing via Google's Picasa. If you have multiple blogs, each blog will have a separate album folder. And these folders will also be separate from any additional albums you create through Picasa's interface.

You sign into Picasa in the same way you sign into Blogger, as both are connected to your Google account.

In Picasa you can make the album public, if you wish, add captions, email the images to friends or relatives, or even order prints. (Though the prints aren't likely to be of great quality unless you've uploaded the images at a high enough resolution.)

When viewing an individual photo they provide on the right hand side the html code for linking to or embedding the image elsewhere.

If you delete images from your blog's Picasa album, they will disappear from your blog (and vice versa.) By default they aren't viewable by anyone who isn't signed into your Google account, so if you have no interest in using the Picasa website, you don't have to worry about anyone else viewing the images in this fashion.

Kutano - Combining Twitter and Google's Sidewiki into one App

As I mentioned in my post about Google's SideWiki -- they also opened up their API to allow others to create applications that use comments left in SideWiki.

I received the below email yesterday (Tuesday) morning from a Marketing Manager at Kutano:

I came across your post about Google SideWiki and wanted to let you know that this morning we are expecting to release what we believe to be the very first Sidewiki client ever!

Our tool, Kutano, already works as something of a "SideTwitter", showing tweets about each web page and website directly beside the page and allowing for conversations and comments on the page as well. However, as of early this morning (10AM), Kutano will also be pulling in "high quality" comments that are made in Google's Sidewiki.

The advantage of this, aside from being able to collectively view web page related tweets, Sidewiki and Kutano comments in one place, is that Kutano will also allow users to respond to and start interactive discussions around comments made in Sidewiki. Currently, Sidewiki comments are not threaded and there is no way to respond and engage another person that commented on the web page. Additionally, there is not yet a way to have multiple discussion topics on one page. But using Kutano, people will be able to engage in more interactive and topic-varied discussions about each web page using Sidewiki comments as well as existing web page related tweets and Kutano comments. As can already be done with existing Kutano discussions, users will also be able to tweet out entire discussions as well.

I didn't have time yesterday to test it out, but I have this evening.

First the technical requirements:

Kutano claims that it works on Firefox 3 with Windows (x64 or x86 of XP and above), MacOSX, or Linux. And with Internet Explorer 7 or 8 (32-bits) with Windows (x64 or x86 of XP and above)

I am using it on Firefox 3 with MacOSX.

The Kutano Experience

As a Twitter Application

Kutano creates a fully functional Twitter sidebar on your browser, as can be seen below, but the arrow button in the lower right minimizes the sidebar. Two of the buttons to the right of the textbox are "Tweet about this page" and "insert current page URL". For both Kutano creates its own shortened url for the page. For the former it also adds the text "Reading __Page Title__"

Alone, these are nice added features.

As a SideTwitter

In the above image you can see all the tweets for my recent Wordless Wednesday post. The one tweet from my TransDutch account which automatically tweets every blog entry. Occasionally some of my posts get a little more TwitterLove, but to illustrate the features better, I went to CNN.com

Now I am looking at all the Discussions for CNN. The yellow boxes near the bottom of the panel represent comments pulled in from Google's SideWiki application. The other comments are from Kutano. The numbers in the icons indicate how many posts in each discussion thread.

The email I received from Kutano also indicated Google's API for SideWiki allows them to pull in the comments from SideWiki to use in their App. However, it doesn't provide a mechanism to send comments in the other direction. So discussions that take place on Kutano remain on Kutano.

Thoughts

I don't see myself getting involved in too many side-discussions about a page. Unless of course discussions form around my blog, or any other websites I maintain. I expect most people who have a comment about my blog to post it in the comment threads, or email me. However, not every website has a place to leave comments.

I remember a time not too long ago, back when I was in college and frequented the Usenet bulletin boards, where these discussion threads would have been more appealing to me.

For me the benefit of SideWiki (and Kutano) is the ability to leave notes on a page that otherwise doesn't provide a means to do so. (A blog that doesn't allow comments, or a normal web page without a discussion forum.) The note may provide more information the page doesn't already contain -- or indicate any inaccuracies I feel are there.

I do like the ease of use of Kutano as a Twitter application.

Web Annotation: More Competition

The concept of Web Annotation isn't new. Methods of leaving notes on websites for other users of the application to see date back as far as 1999.

The concept is very appealing. Leaving notes that indicate information is outdated or otherwise inaccurate. Leaving notes that expand upon the information that is presented. Leaving comments in the same manner you might jot a note in the margins of a book.

But unfortunately, the more competition there is, the usefulness of each application diminishes, since the user base for each application diminishes.

So until one application is declared a winner, it's hard to know which application is best to use. One might argue what is needed is for a well-established web entity to enter the Web Annotation market and establish themselves as the service to use. And perhaps open their code for others to use so that there can be competing systems that share the same content.

Enter Google SideWiki

Announced this morning on the Google Blog, currently Google SideWiki installs on Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers using Google's Toolbar.

They allow owners of websites to create messages that will always be on the top of the 'SideWiki' for a page. (They can identify what websites you own through which Google Account you are signed into, and what websites are associated with that account.)

And they are offering access to their API (code) so others can write applications that utilize the content left in SideWiki.

Google Search of the Future?

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, talks about the future of search (Sergey is Google co-founder Sergey Brin)

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just - if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

When asked if they were actually working on the product

“Well, I wish we were. But we don’t exactly have all the medical clinics necessary to test brain insertion.”

As the article indicates, the point of Schmidt's joke (It is a joke, right?) is that search engines have a difficult time reading our minds.

Google Analytics

A month ago, I signed up for Google Analytics to measure who was visiting this blog, and how they were getting here. I had been using SiteMeter, but I wasn't happy with the limited information the free version was giving me.

Now that I have a month of statistics, I thought I would share some of them:

In the past 30 days I had 992 visits - approximately 33 visits a day on average.

Top 10 countries:
US (713)
Canada (62)
United Kingdom (34)
Belgium (26)
Netherlands (18)
Australia (14)
Brazil (10)
Philippines (10)
Mexico (7)
Germany (7)

Top 5 searches that led to the site
"Missouri Genealogy" Genealogywise (20)
Deuteronomy 16 (9)
St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries (7)
Dutch Terms of Endearment (6)
German Terms of Endearment (5)

Top 10 pages viewed
1. Main page (446)
2. label/Wordless Wednesday (75)
3. st-louis-post-dispatch-obituaries.html (54)
4. genealogy-wise-and-its-most-active-and_7337.html (52)
5. thoughts-on-genealogywise.html (42)
6. smile-for-camera-they-worked-hard-for.html (37)
7. label/Amanuensis Monday (33)
8. dont-rely-completely-on-google-alerts.html (31)
9. missouri-digital-heritage.html (30)
10. my-surnames.html (27)

I'm not too surprised by most of this information. I expect the majority of my regular readers to be visiting the main page to read the latest entries. The other pages will be accessed by those who find my site via search engines, are referred from other sites, or those who decide to browse through the archives.

This is proof (to me) that when one does participate in the Wordless Wednesday meme, one should add a link at WordlessWednesday.com. It does bring in new visitors.

I'd be happy with an average of 30 readers a day, but I know it's higher. Google Analytics only measures those who visit the website. There are several other ways to read my posts. The most common is through an RSS feedreader. There are currently 79 subscribers via Google Reader, and 3 through Bloglines. (I've subtracted my own subscriptions from these totals) Most of these readers likely only visit the site when they leave a comment. There are other feedreaders, but these are the only two for which I have access to the statistics.

I also send a copy of my feed to my Facebook Notes application, and my profile page on Genealogy Wise. There is no way for me to know how many people read my posts there, though I have received several comments on my posts on Facebook, so I know I have some friends reading it there. I may have over 100 regular readers. I find this amazing, and gratifying. I want to thank all of you, and hopefully my posts continue to be of interest.