I've been playing with the beta of the new MyFamily.com site. One of the interesting tools there is a feature that let's you narrate your way through a stack of images. It does a pretty good job of making it easy to recreate the experience of thumbing through a stack of pictures with your friends and family. I wondered how it would work to thumb through a stack of artifacts about an ancestor. Here's a really quick example.
I think if the application had a way for me to zoom in on my ancestors name or something else of interest in the records (like Microsoft PhotoStory) it might not be a bad way to share the information.
Check out the MyFamily.com beta. It is free and has some interesting elements.
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2 comments:
I have mixed feelings about video tours. They usually go too fast on things I'm interested in and too slow over what I'm not. "Sequential access" of information isn't something we embrace in IT for a reason.
On the other hand, voice can communicate things that the written word doesn't always do so well. Especially if the voice doing the narration is one of the older generation who can speak first hand on things.
I think the key is to keep the presentations short and well indexed.
I really like this idea. I already own a few programs that allow me to make “movies” on CDs with background words or music or both, but they are all stand-alone programs. This means they are interesting but somewhat clumsy. When I can use them as part of my PAF package then I’ll be very interested. Many people are publishing paper and/or digital “books” about their ancestors and most genealogy program now include some “book making” tools. I could easily see how this video concept would work in that arena. Another example – journals. We are told to utilize journals and verbal or video journals easily work well here. The problem as I see it is that they don’t automatically or easily link with some word-processing program (and actually I desire that world processing program to be part of my PAF package). As the world is turning more to digital and/or web-presentations I believe Family History is well served by any digital concepts focusing attention upon our ancestors. Consequently I really like this idea.
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