Technology: Wiki, Blog, RSS, and Widget
By Beau SharbroughWikis, Blogs, RSS, and Widgets. Characters in a children’s book? Not so. These strange words describe new ways that the Internet is being used by people to exchange information. (Note: If you don’t already use an RSS feed to make your own personal blog or wiki available via a widget to the rest of the world, please suspend your initial, incredible reaction and imagine that you might use these tools to stay in touch with your family and genealogy pals someday.)Before computers and the Internet, people who had something to say had some pretty limited choices. They could publish books or articles. They could try a subscription newsletter. They could use TV news. But these methods of publication were often defended by gatekeepers—editors. However, with the advent of computers and networks, that changed. Just about everyone could self-publish. They could make their own Web pages or send e-mails to a mailing list. The infrastructure was in place for an explosion of ideas, most of which were just seeking an audience.In the twenty-first-century world of ideas, the greatest crime a person can commit is being boring, and the most virtuous is being entertaining. So now that we’ve solved the problems of shelter, clothing, food, and cable TV, we demand that the jester amuse us. And I gotta tell you, it’s not a requirement that the Internet be the lowest form of culture, but the Internet definition of amusement is much broader than my personal tastes would dictate. As one of my college profs said, “The Internet is a mile wide and an inch deep”—what it lacks in quality it makes up for in quantity.
Still, the Internet is what you make it. And a few people are ma king it interesting, informative, and educational.
The Web pages that we made in the late nineties were static. Updating them was a complicated process of creating new content and then republishing the site (or just the changed parts). If webmasters didn’t identify new content, a site’s visitors would have a difficult time staying current. At about the same time, some people who didn’t mind the world seeing their underwear began to publish “web logs”—later shortened to “weblogs” and then “blogs.” Blog became a noun, a verb, and an adjective overnight.
Most blogs are online journals, chronological lists of messages called “posts.” They tend to have just one author, but a number of blogs also allow for reader comments and discussions. There are blogs for fantasy baseball, Dick Eastman’s Genealogy Newsletter, and my own photos. Blogging has become so popular that Google bought Blogger.com and wrote an interface between their photo organizer Picasa and Blogger.
Dick Eastman blogs daily. Leland Meitzler puts something on Genealogy Blog just about every day. Most personal genealogy blogs are much less active. One personal genealogy blog featured posts from September, November, and January—three posts in ten months.
You can go to Blogger.com and start your own blog for free. Google will index it for you so people can find your posts. All you have to do is create new posts whenever you have an idea. People can comment on them. The posts are shown in chronological order, newest first. Try it.
Blogging is easy, wiki-ing is wicked
The Hawaiian phrase “wiki wiki” means “quick.” In the Internet world, a wiki is a website that supports easy-to-add user content and simple edits.Anyone can create or edit articles in a wiki which makes the finished product never truly finished (and subject to vandalism). Probably the most well-known wiki is the Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that also includes current events. At one point during the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings, Wikipedia had a better timeline of events than any of the major news services. The day of the London train bombings, Wikipedia posted photos taken inside the subway cars before the leading Internet news sites did.You might not be so interested in creating an encyclopedia, but the concept of group collaboration on family history and the features of a wiki seem to be a match made in heaven. If you are hoping to start a genealogy wiki for your family, you can get in on the ground floor—there aren’t many genealogy wikis out there yet.
News Flash
Many websites that host blogs and wikis can also send newsfeeds from them to let other computers know what’s new on the site. If you view or create a Web page composed of newsfeeds, viola, you have a dynamic Web page. For example, I’ve created my own personal newspaper at www.newsisfree.com where my world-news page shows current headlines from the BBC, Reuters, the New York Times, USA Today, and the like. Click on one of the linked headlines and you might be taken directly to the Reuters site to see the article. Then click the back button and you’re looking at my newspaper page again. My paper has a sports page, a science page, a space page, and so on. Google News uses a similar concept—it’s a fine newspaper if you like the middle of the fairway.
Workable Widgets
A widget is a graphical element—a computer program that works as a simple tool. First popular on the Macintosh computers, widgets are now available for Windows as well, provided you have a widget manager. Konfabulator, a software company recently purchased by Yahoo! (and don’t think I don’t get tired of writing “so and so was recently purchased by” Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft, but I live with it) makes a widget manager. If you download it (it’s free, so why not), you can get widgets that display a running clock, your remaining cell phone minutes, an iTunes remote control, your local weather, the lowest gas price in your area, a to-do list, desktop post-it notes, even a baseball score widget that shows the men on base in ongoing games.Some people have been concerned with the computer resources used by the widget manager, and they look for ways to save those. This concern has created a need for and the creation of gadgets.
Gadgets are widgets that run stand-alone, without a widget manager. I recently tried Natural Desktop. It’s kind of cool—it makes pictures and natural sounds like birds and frogs. It’s got a weather gadget that shows where the sun is in the sky, and moves the clouds proportionally to the current wind velocity in your zip code.
There are a lot of free news-reading widgets and gadgets. And I can envision getting a gadget one day that takes a newsfeed from a genealogy blog or a surname wiki. The widget would fl oat on my desktop and show me what’s new, what’s cool, and what’s coming, as Curt Witcher used to say.
Let’s get a reality check. Can’t I read all of the information a widget is giving me with my browser? Yes. So why would I want a widget instead? You might not. But I think the intrusive and dynamic nature of widgets and gadgets make them worth exploring. And I’m not the only one. During the past year, Google bought Picasa and Blogger. Yahoo! bought Flickr and Konfabulator. Your online future contains more wikis, blogs, newsfeeds, widgets, and gadgets than you can shake a stick at. And just wait, pretty soon you’ll be wanting to learn about podcasts, too.
Beau Sharbrough is an employee of MyFamily.com, Inc. He lives in Provo, Utah, and writes the RootsWorks articles for the Ancestry Daily News.
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