Tika & RootsTech Trivia

Tika did not view any of the RootsTech presentations but I told her all about them. Some 4500 people from a dozen countries and nearly all U.S. states attended and in the main auditorium the speaker was in the center and there were two huge screen to the left and two to the right so everybody could see. It was awesome.

What did I learn about Evernote:  "It is no improvement to go from a mess to a filed mess..... it's still unorganized and you still can't find what you want."  Meaning, stuffing binders, filing cabinet drawers and file folders is no answer; using a computer genealogical program, or putting your tree up on the cloud, or using a super online note keeping program (like Evernote) makes good sense in this digital age.

What did I learn about Facebook? "Facebook has 845 million active users per month and only 8% of them are in the U.S. Genealogy is about people; Facebook is about people."  If you think of Facebook as a way to connect with cousins and not just a wuzz-wuzzing forum, you'll see Facebook in a new light.

What did I learn about Ancestry?  Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry, used the term "bag of words." They use this term in-house to mean "we have this bag of words that is meaningful and how are we going to make it accessible and useful to genealogists?"  Ancestry has a team of several hundred engineers working to develop new techniques in content recognition and record linking; they're working to make more data "searchable, hintable, recognizable and attachable to your tree."

Was RootsTech worth the effort, the time and the expense to attend? Absolutamentally. Will I attend next year (21-23 March 2013)? Absolutamentally.  Will Tika miss me? Absolutamentally.