Nov 8-14 1999

From merope@Radix.Net Mon Nov 8 17:42:06 1999

Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 17:42:04 -0500 (EST)

From: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

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What you want to know, when you want to know it...its Your Daily Board

Show!

*warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk!

Saturday 6 November 1999:

There is no Board-L traffic on this date.

Go West, Young Man Corner: The Bureau of Land Management has made

available all California Land patents at its web site. According to the

announcement from the BLM, "This site contains high quality primary

records that are valuable to genealogists. The site includes a name index

for every patentee in the State of Californi, and has over 260,000

records, organized by county.

This website is available at: http://www.ca.blm.gov/landpatents/

"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other

reason but because they are not already common."

--John Locke (1632-1704)

This has been your Daily Board Show.

-Teresa Lindquist

merope@radix.net

--------

From merope@Radix.Net Tue Nov 9 14:54:17 1999

Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 14:54:12 -0500 (EST)

From: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

Reply-To: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

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Eat your heart out...its Your Daily Board Show!

*warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk!

Sunday 7 November 1999:

There is no Board-L traffic on this date.

The More The Merrier Corner: For those of you who can't get enough of

threaded message boards, Ancestry.com now has its own set. According to

their webpage, there are currently 66,461 surname message boards, and 282

state and country message boards. There are an additional 889 boards

devoted to various genealogy research topics. There are currently no

separate boards for counties, but something tells me that won't last for

long. The message boards are located at:http://www.familyhistory.com/

Go wild!

"We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember

with gratitude how we took them along on our picnics."

---Bill Vaughan

This has been your Daily Board Show.

-Teresa Lindquist

merope@radix.net

-------

From merope@Radix.Net Thu Nov 11 08:52:07 1999

Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 08:52:06 -0500 (EST)

From: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

Reply-To: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

To: Daily Board Show <usgw_all@listbot.com>

Subject: Daily Board Show

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Shiny as a new dime...its your Daily Board Show!

*warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk!

Monday 8 November 1999:

Webmaster Pam Reid asks for new Board member's email address so she can

update the Who's Who Board page. Rich sends his email address

[richpump@wf.net] to the group.

Tuesday 9 November 1999:

Pam thanks Rich for forwarding his email and lets him know he's now listed

on the web page.

NC Tim Stowell posts a notification that the USGW Project is now listed in

a directory at:

http://www.accessgenealogy.com/links/pages/Locations/NA/

Lost In Space Corner: For a brief time yesterday all the USGW domain

names, which are housed on Root$web, forwarded to Root$web's Community

pages and all of the state page extensions returned "404" errors.

According to Leigh Compton, "...there was a DNS (domain name server)

change this afternoon which moved the address for the USGenWeb virtual

domain. A DNS change takes approximately 1 hour to propagate throughout

the Internet, so keep checking back to see when your ISP has picked up the

change." In a couple of hours, folks were reporting that all was working

well.

Shake Your Money Maker Corner: Brian "I'd Sell My Shorts" Leverich is

once again using the failure of his staff to keep all of Root$web's "bells

and whistles" running properly as an opportunity to harangue the troops

for not giving RW more money. And, in his own fashion, he's managing to

insult them as well. The latest incident started when a RW user remarked

on the Rootsweb-help list that Genseeker hasn't worked properly for months

and asked for an update on its status. When an answer wasn't forthcoming,

she asked again, and several other people noted they were having problems

as well. When Brian did finally respond to the questions [fully three days

after the original question was asked], he basically told them it was

their fault for not sending enough cash. He says, in part, "We do the

best job we can to hide it, but the staff here is stretched absurdly

thin... RootsWeb.com alone supports roughly three (3) times the traffic of

both Ancestry.com and FamilyTreemaker.com combined...We do that with

voluntary contributions that are substantially less than a tenth of what

genealogists spend to access locked-up data on Ancestry and Broderbund's

sites. That means we have less than 3% (that's less than three friggin

percent) of the revenue per unit of service that Ancestry or Broderbund

has." Brian then helpfully tells folks what they can do about the

overworked staff and poorly maintained features at Root$web. This includes

yelling at them, but Brian notes, "A more constructive response is to help

us tell the public our story and help our users understand that their

contributions completely determine the quality of service we can provide.

I can tell you with certainty that system administrators at RootsWeb would

be able to deliver unfailingly timely and accurate information to you and

TONS of new features to help you if the genealogy community just supported

us the way they spend money at Ancestry and Broderbund."

In another message, Brian notes "You'd be frightened by how far in the

hole RootsWeb is at the moment", and finally does tell people why

Genseeker is down. He also notes that soon RW will have another fancy

gadget that should provide a "permanent solution to this problem. When we

field the "Very Large (server) Array", it will solve this problem in an

elegant, cost- effective, and very, very complete way." He notes that

Genseeker will be down for another 5 days.,

As might be expected, a user wrote that they don't appreciate his

"diatribes" in response to nicely asked questions, and points out that "if

you would like to see more donations - that type of talk won't get

them.... As the saying goes - we catch more flies with honey..." To this,

Brian replied, "I'm almost never upset and I have the patience of

Job...When an announcement isn't made to RootsWeb-help in a timely

fashion, it's not because you're being ignored by all two hundred staff

members employed by fatcats who are making money hand over fist by locking

data up from the public", but rather because "one of the tiny handful of

people who make RootsWeb happen on an absurdly tiny budget is so swamped

with the other 942 crises they are simultaneously addressing that they

dropped the ball." He notes that "If you want us to do better, the thing

to do is to help us encourage more people to become Contributors...if just

4% of our estimated Web users were supporters, we'd have the resources to

make sure notifications were prompt *and* to bring a whole flock of new

tools for Webmasters online." [see folks, its all your fault!]

Update on the News Corner: A reader reminds us, "It has now been well

over 6 weeks since the several soc.genealogy.surnames.___ newsgroups went

dark. The Root$web explanation then was something to the effect that the

auto-moderator broke as a result of a server upgrade and would be fixed

when they got around to it. Since they haven't gotten around to it, can

we assume that this valuable and convenient genealogy service has been

sacrificed so that they may devote their resources to making more money by

forcing people to search confusing advertising-based web pages and by

setting up sites for cats and dogs? Or am I just too cynical and

mean-spirited?" The DBS cannot, of course, answer all these questions,

but yes, it does appear that getting the soc.genealogy.surnames hierarchy

functioning again is not high on RW's priority, although whether this is

because they generate no ad revenue, we cannot say. We note one slight

correction though. The newsgroups are not entirely "dark"; they are being

used to distribute the Root$Web Surname List. [hey, you want it fixed?

Send more $$]

"Anyone remember the "good ole days" when Brian and Karen were as poor as

me and would talk to us 10 times a day???"

--a RootsWeb user, ROOTSWEB-HELP-L, 10 Nov 1999

This has been your Daily Board Show.

-Teresa Lindquist

merope@radix.net

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From merope@Radix.Net Fri Nov 12 06:45:18 1999

Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 06:45:16 -0500 (EST)

From: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

Reply-To: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

To: Daily Board Show <usgw_all@listbot.com>

Subject: Daily Board Show

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Jeepers creepers...its Your Daily Board Show!

*warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk!

Wednesday 10 November 1999:

There is no Board-L traffic on this date.

Throwing In the Towel Corner: Joan Brausch, SC of the MIGW, has resigned

for a second time. According to her announcement on the SC list and to the

MIGW CCs, she will resign effective midnight November 30 and "Nominations

will be open from November 15-21. The election will begin November 23 and

run until November 29. The new SC will start his/her tenure on December

1st." Rumor has it that Joan's resignation follows on the heels of two

other burgeoning crises in the MIGW. One of them involves the disputed

ownership of a transcribed historical work, and the other involves the new

Migrations project, which according to its founder is both independent

from USGW and any other online genealogy organization and neutral in any

disputes between them. Seems some folks in the MIGW are publicly accusing

him of "disloyalty" to USGW for this stance and insisting he make the

project part of USGW.

In Memoriam Corner: Bridgett [Smith] Edwards, former USGW Board member and

now Root$web employee, has notified a smallish group of people [the ones

that send RW money] that "RootsWeb will be having a new site available as

a contributorship benefit. It will be called RootsWeb's Memorial Gardens

and will be a place where you can post your memorials." According to

Bridgett, no firm date is established yet for this new feature's launch,

but it should be available by the end of the month and will be announced

in the RW Review. From the sound of it, it will be another GenConnect

board.

Today's quote is from a reader:

"... it is not on the impassioned partisan, it is on the calmer and more

disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its

salutary effect. Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth,

but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there

is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is

when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and

truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated

into falsehood."

---John Stuart Mill

This has been your Daily Board Show.

-Teresa Lindquist

merope@radix.net

-------

From merope@Radix.Net Sat Nov 13 08:37:11 1999

Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 08:37:10 -0500 (EST)

From: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

Reply-To: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

To: Daily Board Show <usgw_all@listbot.com>

Subject: Daily Board Show

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Stirring a beehive with a stick...its Your Daily Board Show!

*warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk!

Thursday 11 November 1999:

There is no Board-L traffic on this date.

The New Zoo Review Corner: Some interesting new things were announced in

the New Zoo Review this week:

1) Root$web personalized mailing lists: according to the announcements

this will allow you to enter "multiple complex search terms and receive by

e-mail notification each day of ANY new post that matches these search

terms on ANY of RootsWeb's almost 15,000 archived mailing lists."

According to Brian "Manifest Destiny" Leverich, "This may be the best

single tool I have ever used for online genealogy. Magnificent. Simply

magnificent." This marvelous new tool is available only to people who give

Root$web money; other interested parties need not apply. Those of you who

DO give RW money can beta test it at http://pml.rootsweb.com/.

2) Online web page editors: This feature was designed by Alex "Boy Wonder"

Midgly, who, at 18 is described as Root$web's youngest staff member.

This feature is also in beta and is for use with the free web pages.

3) The World Connect project is now out of beta and in general release.

"I have read your article, Mr. Johnson, and I am no wiser now than when I

started."

"Possibly not, sir, but far better informed."

---Samuel Johnson

This has been your Daily Board Show.

-Teresa Lindquist

merope@radix.net

-----

From merope@Radix.Net Sun Nov 14 09:06:32 1999

Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 09:06:31 -0500 (EST)

From: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

Reply-To: merope <merope@Radix.Net>

To: Daily Board Show <usgw_all@listbot.com>

Subject: Daily Board Show

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Magna est veritas et praevalebit*...its Your Daily Board Show!

*warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk!

Friday 12 November 1999:

There is no Board-L traffic on this date.

Tomorrow's News Today: A new motion is proposed by Maggie

Stewart-Zimmerman to change the official project logo, and the motion is

seconded. Discussion ensues.

Endowment for the Arts Corner: Basically, these new logos are proposed to

address the concerns of members with counties in AK and HI that the

current logo essentially leaves them out. Jim Powell has posted the urls

for the proposed new logos to the State Coordinator list, and various

state and regional lists, and has asked for input on the new logos. You

can view them at:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~coriobla/logos/ (For Light Backgrounds)

http://www.rootsweb.com/~coriobla/logos/index1.htm (For Dark Backgrounds)

Discussion on the SC list has been brisk. Most people like the new logos,

and are careful to recognize AK and HI's concerns. However, nearly every

SC that has responded so far is reluctant to allow the Board to change the

project logo solely on its own whim, and is encouraging a project wide

vote. As Trey Holt points out, "The logo of any company, organization,

or project is a very important thing. People instantly recognize The

USGenWeb Project by our logo. The logo was selected in a project wide

election from several entries that were submitted from anyone that wished

to submit a design...I have never been and still am not a big fan of our

current logo but it is the logo that we have been using for several years

and it was approve by a project wide vote and our patrons relate it with

our project." He suggests that the general membership should be allowed

to vote on this in the next election, and that design proposals should be

accepted from the membership at large as well. Some SCs have suggested

that the proposed logos be used as alternates, rather than replacing the

current logo, which would not necessitate the need for a project wide

vote, but which would give AK and HI inclusive logos to use.

Discussion on the Board, although limited thus far, has been pretty much

in favor of imposing a new logo on the project. One idea suggested has

been to have the new logos reside on several servers and have project

members link directly to them rather than keep the logos on the individual

county sites. [While cutting down slightly on the impact of storing

the same graphic multiple times on servers that host multiple county

pages, this would also allow the Board to change the logo whenever it

desired, without even the necessity of notifying the CCs.]

You Get What You Pay For Corner: We hear some complaints rumbling out in

the online genealogy world regarding Root$web's new WorldConnect Project.

This is the project that posts GEDCOMs. It turns out that, like most

companies that accept GEDCOMs, RW claims no responsibility for the quality

of the data on its servers. According to one user who has documented

evidence that a substantial portion of a large GEDCOM submitted to RW has

errors, "I just found out that all my genealogy notes were borrowed

without permission and many facts, including my own father's information

was submitted to this gedcom database incorrectly. Rootsweb is not

responsible it says, talk to the submitter. I have talked to the

submitter. He prefers his version...I have learned the hard way , you can

not even trust Rootsweb.!!!" The information submitted contained

info on living persons, according to the complainant. One respondent to

her message reminds her that she can "attach a 'sticky note' in

WorldConnect to the 'bad info' with your version of reality", but someone

else points out that they had a similar situation develop with Ancestry.

They notified Ancestry and "within _hours_ the offending file was removed

from their site." [It is probably impossible for any online genealogy

company to monitor each and every submission to its online databases,

especially one that runs as close to the bone as RW claims to do. It

generally benefits no one to have incorrect data online, since it merely

propagates errors from site to site, and its downright dangerous to allow

information on living persons to remain online _especially_ after a

complaint has been registered, so its curious that RW refuses to be

responsive to documented evidence of errors in data held on its servers.]

And Its Worth What You Pay For It Too Corner: Although a number of readers

have suggested that Root$web's new contributor-only perk, the Personal

Mailing List, represents the first time RW has charged for a service.

This is not entirely true. RW has always sold web space, mailing lists,

and GC boards on a scale related to the size of the fee a user is willing

to pay, and at one time, Brian "Big Boy" Leverich even offered to throw a

few steaks on the grill for those high-rollers who gave $250/yr or more

and who could make it up to Mt. Pinos. A few months ago they decided to

allow contributors and contributors only the option of receiving Roots-L

postings individually rather than in digest. But the PML is one of

the more generally useful items they've designed in some time, since it

effectively eliminates the worst problem with their mailing list archives,

that of needing to know what lists to search and then having to bounce

back and forth from list to list in order to search them. Its something a

lot of people have been requesting for some time, but if you want to use

it, you'll have to cough up the dough. [Root$web: Where everything is

always free, but some things are more free than others.]

*Great is the truth and it prevails

"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."

---General William Westmoreland

This has been your Daily Board Show.

-Teresa Lindquist

merope@radix.net

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