Just got done watching Lisa Louise Cooke’s session, entitled: Genealogy Podcasts and Blogs 101 that was broadcast free from RootsTech 2012. Yesterday, I had watched Josh Coates’ Keynote Address and was quite impressed with the whole RootsTech conference. In case you're not familiar with RootsTech, it's basically a conference where technology and genealogy people converge and share what's new in their prospective industries. This conference occurs annually in Salt Lake City, Utah typically in February or March.
Last year, at a staff meeting of the society that I work for our president talked to us in depth about the sessions she had attended, ideas, and genealogy and/or tech projects that were going on out in the world. I was truly blown away after hearing what people were doing on the planet.
This year, I learned that RootsTech was going to be broadcasting select sessions live and these would be free. I was very excited that even though I wasn’t able to attend this conference in person that these Keynote Addresses and sessions would be available to others and me. Also, I wouldn’t have to wait around to hear about the cool techie things from someone else.
I had read previously about podcasts, blogs, and webinars in Drew Smith’s book about social networking in genealogy. His book was the impetus for me in starting this blog in the first place. After reading his book and talking with others at work, I looked into genealogy webinars and honestly I wasn’t that impressed with what I found.
Now after watching Ms. Cooke’s session, who is the person behind Genealogy Gems, I will definitely look into genealogy podcasts and maybe even try to seek out some genealogy related videos as well.
On a side note, one of the members of my knitting group recently introduced me to knitting how-to videos. So I really see that the information in whatever subject you’re interested in is out there online—it’s just up to you to find it!
Back to Ms. Cooke’s session, I hadn’t anticipated that I would be that interested in her section about podcasts and the real draw for me was to see what she had to say about blogs, since I obviously have one. I was quite surprised by what I learned about podcasts. She did give me some good tips about my own blog and I’ll have to test those out. One of the suggestions she made was that if you have a genealogy blog, to only post genealogy related items on your blog. This got me to thinking that perhaps I should break up my own blog into several other blogs where the focus is on one hobby only. I’m not really thrilled with that idea, but perhaps those of you who read my posts on a regular basis have your own thoughts on the subject. My thought was to somehow categorize my posts and archived posts into sections so that someone who was only interested in one of my hobbies could just click to read posts about that subject.
I only have one criticism about Ms. Cooke’s session and that was when she started talking about Google blog searching and mentioned that this was a new feature. My experience with searching blogs on Google has been that they’ve had the blog searching function for a long time now and this wasn’t something new as she mentioned this morning. Nonetheless, the content of her sessions was very good and well presented.
The thought of course crossed my mind listening to Ms. Cooke talk about podcasts that I should make my Womble and other genealogy related blog posts into podcasts. However, I’m not quite sure how great my recorded voice would sound to the rest of the world? One of my hopes with creating this blog was that I would meet people who were researching the Womble family or the same line I am and contact me. Another was that interested family members would stay up-to-date with my family history research and give me feedback on my findings.
I will definitely do some more research into podcasts and perhaps become a podcaster due to Ms. Cooke’s session. If this happens, and you’re interested please keep looking for news about this on this blog. This will be where I will let you all know of any future podcasting or any great podcasts that I find out there in the online universe.
