My first book, Social Media for Family Historians, was published in late 2010 by Unlock The Past. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media sites that can help family historians to communicate, share and collaborate with other family historians and with their own families.

It covers new ways to communicate such as Sykpe and SecondLife; social networking sites such as Facebook and GenealogyWise; blogs and microblogs such as Twitter; sites for sharing family trees such as Ancestry and MyHeritage; sites for sharing photos and videos such as Flickr and YouTube; and community information sites such as wikis and social bookmarking.It explains in some detail how to get started with Facebook and blogging.

Contents:
Preface
1. Introduction
2. What is Social Media?
- The Internet
- Self-publishing
- Social media
3. Why use it?
- Advantages
- Disadvantages
4. Communication
- Chat
- Mailing Lists and Forums
- Social Networking
- Blogs
- Microblogging
- Virtual Worlds
5. Sharing
- Family Trees
- Photographs
- Videos
- Social Cataloguing
6. Collaboration
- Wikis
- Social Bookmarking
- Documents
- Questions and Answers
7. Dangers
- Risks
- Some Simple Rules
8. What Are You Waiting For?
Appendix 1. How to Get Started with Facebook
- Sign Up For Faebook
- Using Facebook
Appendix 2. How to Get Started with Blogging
- Find a Host
- Create an Account
- Name Your Blog
- Set Security
- Create your Profile
- Select a Design
- Start Writing!
- More Advanced Blogging
Glossary
Index

You can buy it from Gould Genealogy, and I hope you do!

• Follow an archive day on Twitter
  Today is Follow An Archive day on Twitter. Twitter users around the world are tweeting about their favourite archives, and archives around the world are tweeting about themselves, using the hashtag #f...
• Another genealogy community website – Sirius Genealogy 2.0
  Yesterday I received an email about a new website called Sirius Genealogy 2.0. The email said, in part: Sirius Genealogy 2.0 (SG2) is pleased to announce that we have completed our transformation fro...
• Unlock The Past Expo Victoria
  The last of the four Unlock The Past Expos was held this weekend in Geelong, and it was the biggest and best ever. It was held at the Geelong Arena, the home of the Geelong Supercats (a basketball tea...
• My DNA results have arrived!
  I have previously written about beginning my DNA adventures with a test with 23andMe, a company that focuses more on the health aspects of genetics than the genealogical aspects. They had an offer I c...
• My Top Twitter Followers
  My top Twitter followers of 200 according to http://mytopfollowersin2010.com This site gives you the option of tweeting a list of your top followers, which I did. The tweet it generated was: M...

I have had two encounters with customer service departments this week as a result of online shopping experiences. Both had happy endings against my expectations.

Mobile phone company

The first was with my mobile phone company, Vodafone. My mobile phone, a Nokia E65, is over 3 years old, which doesn’t sound old by normal standards. A lot has changed with mobile phones since then, and I decided that since it was my birthday I would upgrade to a smartphone. My E65 was able to connect to the internet but with the small screen and the need to scroll the mouse up and down and across internet access was slow and tedious and I tended not to use it.

I shopped around and checked reviews and decided on a HTC Legend. My current mobile phone company has this phone, and for that and other reasons I decided to stay with them. I had a play with it in the store and made my decision. I would replace my $20 per month sim-only plan with a $29 per month contract and pay an extra $10 per month for the phone of my choice – $39 per month. This was equivalent to me buying the phone outright somewhere else and staying on my $20 plan, with the added convenience of spreading the payment for the phone over 24 months.

I ordered it online. Part of the process was to tell them my existing phone number so I could transfer my number across to the new plan. By ordering online I could get a $100 credit and surely it would arrive in a reasonable time. I had ordered the Nokia online and had had to spend time on the phone with Customer Service to sort out the account, so I was prepared to have to do this, and decided it was worth the $100 credit I would receive.

After a week the phone hadn’t arrived so I phoned Vodafone. The nice man with the accent assured me that the phone had been picked up by the courier company and gave me the consignment number. When I asked about swapping my accounts to the new phone he assured me that all I had to do was move my sim card to the new phone. The courier company did not have the consignment number on record and said it would take another couple of days, so I was disappointed when I went out the next day, thinking I was safe, and there was a card saying my phone had been left with the post office.

No matter. I picked up the phone, swapped my sim card over, gave the old phone to my husband, and away I went. I’ve had a lot of fun learning how to use it and playing with Facebook and Twitter and searching for information. I reminded myself to check my account online to make sure I wasn’t paying for all this extra internet usage.

I did, and I was. I had racked up $55 worth of downloads in a couple of weeks. I was still on the old sim-only plan. I was furious. I rang Vodafone and spoke to a nice lady with an accent. She put me on hold, looked into it, and promised to ring me back after she’d spoken with her supervisor.

She did ring me back, the same afternoon. She hadn’t been able to find a $39 plan so had put me on a $49 plan. I exploded. She asked me to allow her to finish. She had put a recurring $10 credit on my account, and had refunded the $55 extra charges. So I now get more free calls and a much higher data limit for the life of the contract.

I’m happy! I just wanted to be put on the contract I’d signed up for. I didn’t expect anything extra. Because Vodafone went to the next level to keep me happy, they have made me a satisfied and loyal customer. At least for the 24 months of the contract.

Printing services

The second experience was with a printing service. A company called ?Vistaprint has been marketing very aggressively lately. They were offering 140 free address labels that you could design on their website, with only postage to pay. I played around on the website and ordered some labels for my business, Heritage Genealogy, with the picture that I use on my website to appear on the labels.

They arrived, and I was happy with them. There was a mistake on the website but that was my fault, not theirs. I rarely forget to put the .au on the end of the website address, but this time I did. No matter, I thought, I can write it in.

I have received, since then, numerous emails offering bargains, and on one of them they were again offering free labels. Since they were free I figured I could correct my mistake and improve the picture, which I did. Once you have completed the configuring of the labels they offer other products and show you pictures of them with your picture and address inserted. There were pads and post-it notes at very low prices, so I ordered one of each. My order came to about $10, plus postage.

When I was checking out, the website offered me an additional pad and  post-it notes with free postage. Since the amount of the postage came to about the same total as adding these items I agreed, thinking I was getting free postage for ordering more items. When I realised that it just meant no further postage would be charged I tried to go back but the order had been placed.

I was furious. I am reasonably savvy when it comes to computers and websites, and I felt I had been tricked into ordering more at the last minute with no opportunity to change my mind.

I think that if this had happened a few years ago I would have chalked it up to experience and left it at that. It was only about $15 more. No. I found the Contact Us page and told them what I thought of their website and their marketing practises.

That was a few days ago. This morning I received an email to say that they had given me a refund on the extra items I’d ordered and an apology for any inconvenience. The extra items have not been cancelled and so they are sending them with their compliments. I have already received notification from PayPal that the refund has been received.

So I’m less furious than I was, and happy that I will be getting what I thought I was ordering in the first place. I still think their website is misleading and I imagine most people who get tricked this way just let it go. I will probably use them again and be more wary, although I now have enough labels, post-its and pads to last me a good long while.

Lessons learned

1. Times are getting tougher for businesses, mine as well as the bigger ones.  Repeat business is important, and for customers to keep coming back they need to be happy and think well of your business. It pays to give a little something to keep them onside.
2. Don’t be afraid to complain when something isn’t right, even if it’s only $15 worth. If they are a business worth sticking with they will fix your problem and go out of their way to offer you more than you expected. They don’t know about problems unless we customers tell them.

Free images courtesy of Ekaterina Gorelova on Dreamstime

• Social Media for Family Historians
  My first book, Social Media for Family Historians, was published in late 2010 by Unlock The Past. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media site...
• Sharing documents on the web
  I've been playing with a couple of sites that allow you to share documents. Initially I had to find a way to share Powerpoint slides on a blog, and my solution was to use Slideshare, a free website th...
• Another genealogy community website – Sirius Genealogy 2.0
  Yesterday I received an email about a new website called Sirius Genealogy 2.0. The email said, in part: Sirius Genealogy 2.0 (SG2) is pleased to announce that we have completed our transformation fro...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Week 5 – WorldCat
  Week 5 Play with WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a massive network of library content that the public can search for free (user name and password not required). Not every library is a part of WorldCat, b...
• FaceBook advertising debrief
  The ad ran for 4 days in total, resulting in a credit card charge of US$20 and a doubling of the number of fans for the Society of Australian Genealogists page on Facebook. Now all I need to do is ...

I’ve been playing with a couple of sites that allow you to share documents. Initially I had to find a way to share Powerpoint slides on a blog, and my solution was to use Slideshare, a free website that allows you to share Powerpoint slides.

Slideshare is simple to use and works well. You can upload presentations quickly and easily, and make them public or restricted access, by being given a URL that you then share with those you wish to have access to the presentation. Viewers can leave comments, although if your presentation is public these may be spam, a common hazard.

The winner, though, is Scribd.

With Scribd I can share other kinds of documents, not just Powerpoint, so I can keep the slides and the handouts together. PDFs, Word, Excel, so far I haven’t found a format I can’t upload, although I admit I haven’t tried very hard. It does what I need so far.

As you can see, you can import Google Docs and even create one from scratch by typing or cut-and-pasting into the text box. I haven’t tried either of these yet. I can see why sharing a Google Doc here would be easier for the people I know who inexplicably have trouble with Google Docs, particularly if you just want them to see it and not update it.

Others share documents, academic papers, even whole books on Scribd, and you can download the documents and follow the uploaders to see what else they come up with. You can also add documents of interest to collections so you can more easily find them again later, without having to download them.

You can also upload documents that you want to sell. I may do this in the future.

Have a look at Scribd and let me know what you think.

• I don’t love my new Toshiba netbook any more
  Early last year I bought a Toshiba NB200 notebook. It was just what I wanted. I bumped up the RAM to 2GB and installed Dropbox, and I never looked back. I could take my work with me and have it synchr...
• What wasn’t backed up after all
  My old laptop died a sudden death on Good Friday, 22nd April 2011. My new laptop arrived on Black Friday, 13th May 2011. Are you detecting a pattern here? The death of my old laptop was not t...
• Increasing power demands of laptops
  My new laptop arrived last week and the power adaptor is even bigger than the last one. Here's a photo of the adaptors for the last three laptops I've had over the 6 years: ...
• When disaster strikes do you have a backup?
  This post was originally published in Genealogy in NSW. Early last month I wrote about my backup strategy here and here, little realising that I would soon be put to the test. On Good Friday, le...
• Backupify your social media
  Some time ago I had a look at Backupify, an online service for backing up your social media accounts. Obviously I set up an account and then forgot about it. I've had another look at Backupify and ...

Yesterday I received an email about a new website called Sirius Genealogy 2.0. The email said, in part:

Sirius Genealogy 2.0 (SG2) is pleased to announce that we have completed our transformation from a simple blog, into a complete online community for Amateur & Professional Genealogists. The old blog has been shut down and a new membership site has been launched and is publicly available. Membership is FREE! In addition to the general community atmosphere, SG2 has developed numerous Google Gadgets, Web Tools and other services to assist genealogists in their mission. Many more eliciting tools are on their way!

http://www.siriusgenealogy.com

New or Improved Features:

• Live Support via Chat (just look for the icon in the upper right corner of the site)
• Articles, Article and more Articles (Member contributions encouraged).
• Headline News: Links to related news stories from around the world.
• Message Forums: Read what members are saying.
• Speaker Bureau: A place to find speakers for your next genealogy or history related event.
• Events Calendar: A place to find conferences and educational opportunities.
• File Library: Forms, genealogies and more.
• Word Of The Day: A new genealogy related word to challenge you each day!
• Abbreviation Of The Day: A new abbreviation to challenge you each day!
• Web Tools: Cousin calculators, age calculators, Soundex calculators and more.
• Google Gadgets for iGoogle and your web pages.
• Social Activity Monitors: See what genealogists are posting on twitter.
• Marketplace: Look for a growing number of products for this area.

Member Only Features

• Contributions: Get your articles, stories, events and speaker profiles posted.
• Comment and Rate: Comment and Rate just about any page in the site.
• Shoutouts: Post your quick genealogical thoughts to the entire community!
• My Account: A place to manage your membership.
• Message Forums: Meet, greet, share ideas and success stories in the forums!

So, we hope to see you in our new community. Please sure to stop in at the forums to tell us what you would like to see in the future.

I went in to have a look, and there’s a lot to see. Some of the options I clicked on needed me to sign in, so I signed in using my Facebook account and created a profile.

My “Home State or Provence” [sic] is ‘Non-US’, which tells me what I most need to know about the site. It is USA-centric. At least Non-US is at the top of the drop-down list, rather than at the bottom as it usually is.

I can see that this kind of thing might be useful. It seems to me that I have too many sites to keep track of as it is without adding another one that is unlikely to contain anything of immediate interest to an Australian.

I wish them all the best, whoever ‘they’ are.

• Social Media for Family Historians
  My first book, Social Media for Family Historians, was published in late 2010 by Unlock The Past. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media site...
• Unlock The Past Expo Victoria
  The last of the four Unlock The Past Expos was held this weekend in Geelong, and it was the biggest and best ever. It was held at the Geelong Arena, the home of the Geelong Supercats (a basketball tea...
• Have you considered a One Name Study?
  The Guild of One Name Studies has sent me a press release to publicise their special membership offer, and I think it's worth having a look at what they have to offer. The Guild of One-Name Studi...
• My DNA results have arrived!
  I have previously written about beginning my DNA adventures with a test with 23andMe, a company that focuses more on the health aspects of genetics than the genealogical aspects. They had an offer I c...
• Adventures with customer service
  I have had two encounters with customer service departments this week as a result of online shopping experiences. Both had happy endings against my expectations. Mobile phone company The fir...

Week 5

Play with WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a massive network of library content that the public can search for free (user name and password not required). Not every library is a part of WorldCat, but the vast size of the network makes it an important genealogy tool. If you are looking for a specific book or publication, enter the identifying information into the WorldCat search box and see which libraries hold the item. You may even find that you can get the item through your library’s inter-library loan program. Don’t forget to search for some of your more unusual surnames and see what comes up. The goal is to play with WorldCat and examine its possibilities for your own research. If you’re already familiar with WorldCat, play with it again. The network and collection grow and change constantly. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with searching WorldCat for this exercise.

WorldCat is a catalogue of many, many libraries in the world. I’ve used it before and usually it has told me that the book I am looking for is in the State Library of NSW or the National Library of Australia. Unfortunately my genealogy society isn’t part of WorldCat, but one day that will change.

For the sake of this exercise I decided not to look for a book that I know of, but to find books that I didn’t know about. As Amy suggested, I’ve put in one of my unusual surnames – Whippy. David Whippy, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, arrived in Fiji in about 1822 and stayed there.

So I put “Whippy” in the WorldCat search, and waited. 70 results, including a dissertation about job satisfaction in Guam University. I narrowed it down by adding ‘Fiji’, and came up with 5 results, 2 of which were the same.

The most relevant item I found was a microfilm of a play written by Isobel Whippy:

The play concerns the first British Consul in Fiji, William Thomas Pritchard, who arrived in Levuka in September 1858 and was dismissed from his post in January 1863. It is based on a theory that the Consul lost his job because of a love affair with a young woman – possibly a part-European – who gave birth to two children by Pritchard, before he married her in the British Consulate in Levuka a few days afte his dismissal. The play is in two acts – the first covering the period from September 1858 to June 1859; the second from November 1859 to July 1862. There is an epilogue concerning the year 1864.

The microfilm was published by the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau in Canberra, which I happen to know is part of the Australian National University and who microfilm manuscripts related to Pacific history. The films are available in the State Library NSW, and I have accessed them there in the past.

WorldCat, however, told me that my nearest copy was at Yale University Library, New Haven, CT 06520 United States, at a distance of 10000 miles. If I selected the other, identical title, I could find it at the State Library of NSW, the National Library of Australia, and the State Library of Victoria.

There is however, a link to Related Identities, one of which was the Australian National University Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. There’s a timeline for the Bureau that goes back to 1830, which was rather startling until I realised that most of the works listed are about American whalers in the Pacific and such, and filmed by the PMB.

So the end result of my investigation is that I can almost always find what I need in the State Library of NSW, in Sydney where I live. Anything that this library doesn’t have will probably be in Canberra and probably available on inter-library loan, although I haven’t hit this situation yet.

David Whippy didn’t arrive on a whaler but the principle is the same, so I now have a list of resources I can check to find out more about the way of life and the history of Americans in the Pacific, if not about David Whippy directly. Most, if not all, available at the State Library of NSW.

Libraries Australia has  a combined catalogue of many libraries in Australia. I don’t know if all the same libraries are in both catalogues. The free version of this catalogue is within Trove.

I put Whippy in the Search field and got a whole heap of results:

As you can see, there’s a vast array of stuff which will take me some time to work through. Not all of it is relevant, but some of it is. For example, the third entry under Australian newspapers (1803-1954) is a page from the Sydney Morning Herald in January 1856 containing transcripts of correspondence about American activities in Fiji. In one of the letters, written by James Calvert, the Wesleyan missionary, Mr Whippy, my David Whippy, is mentioned a number of times as arbitrating with Mr. Calvert in a dispute between the natives and an American ship’s captain. I was then able to correct the transcription of the notoriously difficult newspaper print, and download a PDF of the page or the whole newspaper.

Further down the screen there are sections for Maps, Diaries and Letters, and Archived Websites. All sections can be opened and closed on this summary screen, or clicked on to give the full list of results.

Trove is relatively new, and having now played with it I can see it is vastly superior to WorldCat for my purposes. Australian catalogues are more likely to be useful to me in general to find a book I can borrow in an Australian library. Trove gives so much more than any library catalog that I would be unlikely to go anywhere else.

It also gave me more books than WorldCat did. On its list of 96 books, journals and magazines, etc, it gives the title Gone Native in Polynesia by Ian Christopher Campbell, a book I’ve been trying to get hold of for some time. This book has a whole chapter on David Whippy in Fiji. There are tabs for each State, and under NSW I can see that it’s available at the State Library of NSW and the University of Wollongong Library. There is also a link to show where I can buy a copy – in this case from Blackwell Online for 70 pounds or Amazon from US$79.00 to US$235.00. I won’t be buying a copy for my library, but I have a search in eBay just in case.

Isobel’s play is there, with the same results – State Library of NSW, and the reference number is given.

Really, I can’t see why I would use WorldCat on a day-to-day basis. Contributers to Trove include Project Gutenberg, so I might be able to download the book I want then and there.

• Social Media for Family Historians
  My first book, Social Media for Family Historians, was published in late 2010 by Unlock The Past. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media site...
• 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History 6 – Radio & Television
  Week 6: Radio and Television. What was your favorite radio or television show from your childhood? What was the program about and who was in it? I grew up in Dubbo, which was a country town of about ...
• Waitangi Day – My first New Zealand ancestor
  The Waitangi Day Blog Challenge is to write about our earliest New Zealand ancestor. I've written before about my great-great-grandmother Margaret Craig, who arrived in the new settlement of Auckla...
• 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History – Home
  Week 4: Home. Describe the house in which you grew up. Was it big or small? What made it unique? Is it still there today? I wonder how many of us lived in the same house all through childhood? I didn...
• 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History Week 3 – Cars
  Week 3: Cars. What was your first car? Describe the make, model and color, but also any memories you have of the vehicle. You can also expand on this topic and describe the car(s) your parents drove a...