What I’m Following - Wed, 18 Feb 2009

The work continues on splitting Behold’s Everything Report into pieces.

But while I do spend a lot of time working on Behold, I also spend time keeping up to date on what else is happening out there with regards to genealogy software.

Most of you know I’ve set up GenSoftReviews, which now pretty much runs on its own with little intervention required on my part. I do add new software to it as I find out or am told about it. But I very much enjoy the reviews, and there has been some hot topics with Geni suddenly drawing the wrath of its users and a battle between the lovers and haters of The Master Genealogist.

Then every day I check my own feed reader for my genealogical daily fix of blog-entered info. First I check what Dick Eastman has to say in his Newsletter. For completeness, I also follow the Software branch of Dick’s Forum, but that isn’t heavily traffic-ed yet.

Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings is my next stop. Don’t know how anyone can blog that much! He sometimes reviews software in great detail step by step from the point of view of an inexperienced user of software, and I find that very valuable in thinking of ways to make Behold simpler to use.

Jean-Yves Baxter lists what’s been changed in every single new version of every genealogy software package known to man at his GeneaNet Genealogy Blog. Whenever he mentions a new feature that I’m curious about, I then go to the software’s website to find out more.

And Tamura Jones, who ruthlessly reviews genealogy (and other) software from a very technical perspective, does not have a blog yet, but he has joined Twitter, and I look forward every day to his Twitter feed.

I follow about 20 other genealogy blog feeds as well, but the four I list above provide the majority of the information I need to keep up on the current state of genealogy software.

But there are a multitude of very interesting genealogy blogs out there if you want to get all sorts of points of view. The best lists are at: Genealogy Blog Finder and GeneaBloggers.

If you haven’t already, you should start saving time and use an RSS newsreader to save time reading the sites you often visit. I use the one built into IE7, but there are many others you can choose from.

Experiment and find the feeds you enjoy the most. But make sure you limit how many feeds you monitor. Otherwise, your hours will slide away as you merrily read on and on.