Re the "unauthorized posting" theme of the previous item, here's a page talking about it. He recommends that if you want something kept secret, then keep it a secret. The problem is the current lack of experience with modern information spread. As he says:

That this is a divisive issue at this point in time is mostly due to how quickly information can multiply in this new "knowledge age".

A fellow was just complaining in a newsgroup that his GEDCOM was posted onto Ancestry by someone he shared it with. He didn' like that.

Well, GEDCOMs, even more than MP3s and jpegs, get spread around pretty quick these days. Only a few things, active things like viruses, for example, spread faster. They say "information wants to be free" and GEDCOMs demonstrate that very well.

But it does point out a serious conflict, one between the positive aspects of sharing (helpfulness, getting farther, less wasted effort) and the negative aspects (loss of credit for work, "theft" or plagiarism). We really are in need of ways to avoid the negative aspects so that more sharing of genealogy will be encourage.

Hurray for the WayBack Machine! I was on a GenWeb site (for Haverhill, MA) looking at a page on an ancestor (Robert Clements). The page said not to miss the bio on him that Wayne Clement had (providing the link). But, sigh, the link was bad, going to a domain, waynesworld.org, that was out of operation (and in the hands of a domain dealer wanting $285 for it).

Luckily, it dawned on me that there's a chance the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine could find a copy. Click, tippy-type, flash ... there it was!

PHPGEDView can be used to support a web site for doing collaborative genealogy. It's open source; doesn't look too bad. Might it be enhanced to support evidence collection? This would mean supporting alternative, conflicting, data for facts, with changing evaluations of those data. Ideally, each user could have his own view of the facts, relying on the judgement of whatever people they want.

It's a meme!

Found this experiment in another blog and thought I'd join in:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Here's mine: "What does any office suite do for you?"

From: Gurdy Leete et al., OpenOffice.org for Dummies (2004).

I was looking at Family History Documentation Guidelines, 2nd edition. They suggest using <I> (HTML-like) tags around pieces of entries like periodical names to get italics. I say forget it... it only affect certain print operations, and all other uses have those ugly tags squatting there.

Slashdot has an amusing discussion on nigritude ultramarine, a contest to manipulate Google results. If the Googlers are on the ball, they'll use the constest results to help better spam-proof Google. SEO mavens may be black and blue from the nigritude ultramarine.

It's amazing how much junk is floating around in the genealogy world. This is seen most obviously in collections based on gedcom files. Prime examples are World Family Tree, WorldConnect (rootswebs), Ancestral File and Pedigree Resource File. Search for a particular person, say one from the 1700s, and up will pop all kinds of garbage. Much of the garbage is recognizably copies of a few source gedcoms. Clearly there is wild name collecting going on by appending gedcoms without much examination. Ooooh, you have 50,000 names in your file, I'm impressed (and I'll be sure to stay away).

Well, the modified GEDCOM does make a better basis for comparison using a normal text compare program, but... the results (unless comparing closely related files) tend to be too busy for ease of review. I'm finding the old fashioned way better for my current purposes. (e.g. import all GEDs into PAF and make notes on important details).

I'm putting together a GEDCOM transformer which can be used in conjunction with a text file comparison program to compare GEDCOM sources. The main thing is that it changes the identifiers to ones based on the names, and alphabetizes them so that two distinct files will have some chance of comparing reasonably. Have yet to do some serious compares; maybe tomorrow.