Kindo Family Blog

It’s back to school time, and maybe you’re thinking you need to know more about genealogy techniques and methods. One way to learn about genealogy is to take an online  course. Here are a few suggestions to get you started: Introduction to Genealogy from National Genealogical Society (U.S.) Most genealogists take this course first. It is very American-centric, but the techniques can be applied to any country’s vital statistics. There are more advance courses for specific regions and resources (e.g. wills). Introduction to Genealogy is an online course for those who have done little, if any, research on their families. It is open to anyone who wishes to enroll. Members of the National Genealogical Society (NGS) receive a tuition discount. Family History Personal Enrichment Classes Learn from Brigham Young University about research in the United States, France and Germany. These are non-credit courses, so there are no exams! Certificate in Genealogical Studies The National Institute for Genealogical Studies has joined forces with the Professional Learning Centre, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto to provide web-based courses for both family historians and professional genealogists. Canadian-based. GenClass Online classes in a variety of genealogical topics are conducted online by qualified, experienced instructors. Each four-week class includes a detailed course curriculum and online class meetings for $29.95. A more comprehensive listing, along with seminars, workshops and classes, can be found in my book.

One way to share what data you have and note what data you need is to post your genealogy on the web. Before you do that, however, please read the Guidelines For Publishing Web Pages On The Internet. This document sets out the best ways to make your page findable and useable by other genealogists.

How do you publish? Why using the Kindo interface, of course, is one easy way. Just remember this important rule: Leave out data on living persons if you can.

That brings up another point, that is very, very important. Some folks are afraid that their hard work and research might be “stolen” from the Internet, so they deliberately insert factual errors on their web pages.

Dont. Do. That.

Ever.

If you have data you want to keep in reserve for future information swaps, simply omit it. If you have data you want to keep private until you publish your hardbound, limited edition genealogy, that’s fine. And of course, never publish anything that could be used to steal your identity.

But do not ever publish anything, in print or online, that you know to be false. It’s extremely difficult to remove all traces of anything on the Web, and that incorrect information may linger longer than you do!

Happy Family Tree Climbing!

EPC

Are you using facebook to stay in touch with your friends?
You should join the Kindo fan page then! It’s another place for you to mingle with the Kindo team, drop us a line and get the latest news from the Kindo family.

And finally some of your friends may be happy, if you tell them about Kindo as well. And watch out for your local Kindo group! There are some, for example in Turkey or Germany.

When I have heard about the Barcamp at Lake Constance I knew straight away that I wanted to go there. After all I grew up only 20 kilometers from the lake.
Finally the barcamp took place yesterday and today at the brand new venue of Zeppelin University. Some of the top bloggers and internet thinkers around Germany, Switzerland and Austria were present, like Robert Basic, Jan Theofel and obviously the organiser Oliver Gassner. I gave a session on the internationalisation of webservices, talking about Kindo and some of our experiences while getting this service live in 16 languages!

Thanks for the huge attendance and good feedback! Hope I will see some of you guys again soon. And maybe some of you barcampers gave Kindo a try

| View | Upload your own

Hello all!

I am Elizabeth Powell Crowe, known to my friends as “Libbi”.  I have a blog with news, hints and musings on genealogy.  And, I’m a writer as well as a genealogist, so of course I have a book, Genealogy Online 8th Edition. Just so you know a little about me, I live in Florida, USA. My family is scattered throughout Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Texas, California, Florida, and North Carolina. Oh, and I probably have a ton of Powell relations in Missouri, as well, but I haven’t tracked them down yet.

So the reason I’m typing all this here is that I’ve been asked to do a weekly Genealogy Basics tip for this blog, and I’m happy to oblige. Now sometimes, I tend to talk about how the watch is made instead of what time it is, so if my entry leads to more questions than answers, just leave a comment and I’ll try to clear it all up!

So here is this week’s tip: Learn to search for genealogy in your pajamas. Use services from your local library, from sites such as Kindo, and other resources from your computer at home! For example, the British Library owns the world’s largest collection of research materials on many subjects, including genealogy. Using your computer you can access the BL by:

* British Library Direct: search 20,000 journals for free and order full text with your credit card.
* British Library Direct Plus: subscription based service containing   over 67,000 titles with full text ordered via a credit card or   account.

For information on all of their services, visit: http://www.bl.uk/articles.

Until Next Week!

Libbi

After having reached the Finals of UK’s Most Promising Internet Company 2008, Kindo is on the verge of capturing the hearts of our Spanish friends in the Startup 2.0 competition.

If you like Kindo you can just go here and vote for us! You will have to register though…

Hey, everybody has a great family. And we all love our moms and dads. But our stats show that some of you have amazingly great family trees on Kindo!

We are happy that you love using Kindo as much as we do and wanted to say thank you to all of you! But it won’t be just talking, we will give you real presents as well:

The “Biggest Family Tree” and the “Biggest Family Community” on Wednesday the 20th of February at high noon will get a Spreadshirt-voucher for our Kindo shop worth 20 Euros!

So why don’t you get youself a free “Daddy’s favourite” - T-Shirt like the one on that pic here? Just grow your tree and become the Kindo family with the highest number of profiles or the highest number of family members who joined the tree! And by the way: We will have one winner per language.

Show everybody that you have the greatest family on earth: Tell your relatives and get the Kindo “Biggest Family” award!

Last week, we had a famous and interesting visitor in Istanbul. We were invited to a seminar by Jimmy Wales who is the founder of Wikipedia. It’s not so common that this type of guests speak everyday in your country so we went there. It took place in Ortakoy Esma Sultan Yalısı which is one of the best organization centers in Istanbul. The good thing about the seminar was invitees were all from either press or the bloggers. So, we also had a great chance to have some networking opportunities with the people whom we personally do not know but follow their blogs.

For example, Volkan (http://blog.wolkanca.com/) who was so responsive in his Kindo investigations and one of the first to give a link to Kindo website was also there. We also came across Suleyman who is a devoted blog writer with his professional camera while taking pictures for his website www.gunesintamicinde.com and I need to thank to him since he took our pictures when I got angry to myself for forgetting my camera at home. In addition to that, we also had a chance to talk to many other bloggers of which Arda Kutsal was a great supporter of Kindo. Arda is a well known blogger in Turkey with his www.webrazzi.com and www.blograzzi.com websites and his enthusiasm to follow the latest trends in web2.0 world. He said Kindo is a great place for family social networking and informed me about his coming review about Kindo and niche social networking websites in general. I’ll keep you posted about his review as well.

The conference was really perfect in terms of the organization and in terms of the performance of Jimmy in presenting and answering questions. Main topics discussed were about Wikipedia’s future stance and Wikia search. I will not go in detail about this in this blog post which you might elsewhere find about it; however, I can say Jimmy kept insisting on Wikipedia is a non-profit organization and not seeking for easy way of earning money from paid advertising. And, they have now focused on Wikia search engine project. I was also surprised that there are only 12 people working officially for Wikipedia.

We waited the whole conference ended to have a personal contact with him and introduce Kindo. However, we only had the chance to take a picture as a memory from the day. But, then I have sent an email to him and asked for testing Kindo. I’ll tell you in another blog post when he writes to me next time.

Until then, as the fellows here say, get your family and have a great time with them.

We are glad that you like Kindo and go on talking about us. It was obviously the Chinese and Arabic languages that make you happy. Internetworld, one of the biggest internet newspapers in Sweden for example, has put Martin on the front page.

And it is the core family networking features of Kindo as well that caught your attention and our Team is always happy to talk with you about it. Simon for example got featured in a seven minute video interview on Intruders, that is a follow up of “le web 3″ - conference in Paris last month.

And you can see that France is going crazy about Kindo by looking at two more great posts on Emob and the French version of Techcrunch.

Thanks for your coverage and stay in touch!

Probably the number one feature request for Kindo, over and above better deleting of profiles in the family tree, is for photos. We always knew that would come, so I’m pleased as punch to say that we’re working on it, and hope to release the first iteration of Kindo family photos soon.

That said, I would like to know if there are any specific photo features that Kindo users would like to see, apart from the usual features you’d find on any social service that enables you to store photos (creating and viewing albums, uploading photos to albums, commenting on both, tagging photos; are the basics).

For example, here are some ideas that have been flying around the Kindo office of late:

1. Send photo as digital postcard - imagine sending that photo of your wedding / family event to your family easily
2. Add to your favourites - imagine having a list of all your favourite photos of your family
3. Let people outside my family tree see my photos - imagine being able to allow your close friends to view your photos without them having to log in
4. Being able to crop/move/rotate photo’s - imagine being able to do stuff to your photos in the browser so they look better
5. Viewing some stats - imagine being able to see how many people viewed your albums / photos, and what photos are most popular

Anyways, these are just some ideas, and are pretty much influenced by what is already out there.

We’d like to build stuff that people will use a lot, and enjoy using, so it’s really important that we get some feedback from you guys to understand what’s really important to you!

So, please comments in this post - what do you want to see in a photos feature??

kindo, features, web2.0, photos, users, usability