If you search for \”family link\” or \”familylink\” on Google, the first hit is not http://www.familylink.com. Today, on the query \”familylink\”, hits #5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 all refer to FamilyLink.com, but they are from blogs and press releases. Google is not yet ranking FamilyLink.com as the most relevant result for these queries.
Category Archives: World Vital Records
FamilyLink.com soft launch
I have been in NY and Chicago this week, and haven\’t found the time to blog about this yet, but our wonderful sleepless team at World Vital Records has quietly opened up FamilyLink.com to the public.
We are hoping for a few thousand early users, experienced genealogists primarily, to set up personal profiles, tell us what cities they do research in (and where they live), create some ancestor pages, and most of all, give us lots of feedback about the site features and design.
Catching The Geni That’s Out of the Bottle: Introducing FamilyLink
On January 16th, an amazing, innovative, well-financed company (especially now, after raising $10 million!) launched a brilliant, web 2.0 based online family tree building tool called Geni..
My European Awakening
I just returned from 7 days in Europe. Thanks to LinkedIn Answers, I probably saved $1,000 on airfare on this trip by taking the advice of some of my connections who are more experienced last-minute travellers. (I\’ve joked that with all this great advice, I could publish an ebook on last minute European travel and probably sell it for $10 on our ebook site.)
Physical Libraries vs Electronic Libraries
The Everton Collection at the Logan Library in Logan, Utah could use more visitors.
Last September Leland Meitzler on his excellent genealogyblog broke the following news about one of the largest private genealogical collections in the U.S.:
I really feel that I\’m being premature in posting this blog, but since the word is now circulating on the Internet, I\’m forced into it. Yes – plans are underway for the Everton library to open in early October. I will announce the actual opening when it happens.
The Everton collection, which has been unavailable to the public for over two years now, will be opening soon. Logan Library Director Ron Jenkins has been interviewing potential librarians for the collection – and earlier this month, Jenkins hired Jason Cornelius, who is moving from Salt Lake City to Logan. Cornelius will be a full-time librarian, cataloging and overseeing the daily operations of the collection.
International Genealogy and Search Engine Rankings
For many years I have wanted Ancestry.com to go international, since the world population is more than 20 times larger than the U.S. population. I felt that a Rootsweb-type model could be done in virtually every country of the world, followed at sime time, by an Ancestry-type subscription model. The one (a user generated content model) would lead to the other (a premium database model.)
Note: I left the company in February 2002 and have no inside information about the company or its plans.
Required Reading for Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs
I just recommended that our World Vital Records team all get copies of the new book from 37signals called Getting Real. Get this: you can read it free online or buy a PDF or paperback version of it. They\’ve sold 20,000 copies so far.
Ancestry.com “Thrilled” With New Genealogy Startups
The Salt Lake Tribune published this interesting article two days ago:
Utah-based Ancestry.com, with 900,000 subscribers the reigning king of commercial Internet genealogy services, welcomes Geni.com and a spate of other online family history newcomers to its world.
\”For years, we were the only ones driving growth in this category,\” said Tim Sullivan, CEO of Generations, which owns Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com and related sites.
\”So when we see Geni or any number of new genealogy upstarts, we\’re thrilled,\” Sullivan said.
Unlimited Storage at World Vital Records
World Vital Records recently added new hardware to triple our searching capacity and almost 10 times our storage capacity for images. This allows us to collect family trees and historical photos as well as post newspaper images much faster. Our images server now has over 7 terabytes of storage. All of our searching is done using 64 bit operating systems on quad processor boxes with 8 gig of ram.
Job Openings at World Vital Records
We will be officially posting some officially worded job openings at World Vital Records soon, but sometimes I think, why not blog about them, even before they are fully baked? One of my blog readers might be perfect for one of these spots or know the right person. We might be able to hire the right applicant, even before getting the job openings listed formally on our company web site.
Here are a few positions that we will be recruiting in the coming days/weeks:
