Tag Archives: social networking

Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, if you self-publish, don’t miss Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials.   This is a terrific site for anyone involved in book design.  And if you’re like me and don’t include pricing on your website, you might change your mind after reading Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing.

  • Telling Life Stories Through Quilts. “Generations of women have been telling stories in fabric — with quilts. Lisa Morehouse paid a visit to one quilting bee in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley. Many of the group’s members emigrated to work in the local apple orchards and vineyards.”
  • End of life: You shared your stories. “As part of the Globe’s in-depth series on End of Life decisions in the 21st century, we asked you to tell your stories around this difficult topic. Readers from across the country joined the conversation.”
  • The Life Reports II. “A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons.”
  • Not Your Grandmother’s Genealogy Hobby. “Wikis, social-networking sites, search engines and online courses are changing genealogy from a loner’s hobby to a social butterfly’s field day. New tools and expansive digital archives, including many with images of original documents, are helping newbies research like pros.”
  • Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing. “Think about the last time you went to a website for a product or service that you couldn’t buy outright online. Did it list prices? Or did the site encourage you to call for more information? How many times do you walk away from a purchase simply because you couldn’t get enough information on pricing to make an informed decision?”
  • Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials. “When you sit down to design a book, there are organizational tasks you have to address right at the beginning. Getting your raw materials organized and making sure your workflow will produce an efficient publishing process are important enough to spend some quality time on. Let’s take them one at a time.”
  • Family Tree Magazine Podcast Episode Notes. “Tips on how to get relatives to discuss family history, a discussion of the Historic American Cookbook Project, and news on the Genealogists for Families project at Kiva.com. Plus: Learn more about creating a family history book from Family Tree University’s Nancy Hendrickson.”

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From the Archives: Shut Down Your Computer!

Shut Down Your Computer! If you’re like most personal historians, you spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen. I certainly do. Lately, I’ve come across information that suggests that I need to shut off my computer and get outside. In fact, if I don’t, it could kill me! A recent Swedish  study reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that  prolonged sitting can lead to cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. While this isn’t earth shattering … Read More


Monday’s Link Roundup.

This Monday Link’s Roundup has two items you’ll not want to miss. The first is the Free One Day Online Conference which offers a wonderful opportunity to learn how social media can support your business. The second is The Gardener’s Bucket List which illustrates yet another creative way that family stories can be told.

  • Book Review: The Last Muster by Maureen Taylor. “I sat down yesterday evening to read a new book by Maureen Taylor with significant contributions by David Allen Lambert: The Last Muster – Images of the Revolutionary War Generation. I figured I’d spend an hour or so speed-reading it, and then I would write a review and go to bed early. I was wrong! I ended up reading every word, looking at every picture, and not writing the review at all until today. The book is that interesting.”
  • MacFamilyTree. Version 6.0 Public Beta. “Easily enter and then visualize your family history. Be it creating reports, diagrams or browsing your data in the innovative 3D view called Virtual Tree – MacFamilyTree offers a solution for every task. Get an overview of where you hail from and maybe enthuse your relatives about exploring your family’s past at your upcoming family reunion.”
  • The Gardner’s Bucket List.  “I never really wrote anything down when I was a young gardener my successes and failures drifted off with memory. But when I had children I realized how important a garden journal really was in my busy life. My journal has become a family history along with a record of my garden successes and failures…Allow your gardener’s journals to stand in honor with your photo albums and pictures because as some of my stories have proven they can create a more vivid picture of your time, your family, and your land.”
  • Jewish History of the Late 1940s in Color Videos.“Fred Monosson, a Boston Jewish multimillionaire, purchased one of the first privately-owned portable color movie cameras in the 1940s, then traveled to Europe and Israel to record the historical formation of the state of Israel in color…His grandchildren recently cleaned out the house to prepare it for sale and were about to throw out the old films, believing that nobody would want them. However, one of the grandchildren decided to first call a friend who was an Israeli movie director.”
  • Hey, Doc, I’m a story, not just a symptom. “Having moved so many times in my adult life, I’ve rarely had the chance to really connect with “my” doctors. Some make it easier than others. They are the ones who know how to listen, who want to know the context of whatever symptoms walk through the door. They want to know my story.”

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Shut Down Your Computer!

If you’re like most personal historians, you spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen. I certainly do. Lately, I’ve come across information that suggests that I need to shut off my computer and get outside. In fact, if I don’t, it could kill me!

A recent Swedish  study reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that  prolonged sitting can lead to cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. While this isn’t earth shattering news,  the discovery that no amount of exercise  eradicates this risk certainly was.

A similar Canadian study published last year tracked more than 17,000 for an average of twelve years. It also found that exercising had no effect on reducing health risks in sedentary people. Clearly, if I want to live longer, I’d better get up from my computer more often and start moving!

If that’s not convincing enough, here’s another reason to unplug your computer. This week I came across an article in The Harvard Business Review, For Real Productivity, Less is Truly More. The author Tony Schwartz argues quite persuasively that working ten or twelve hour days is counterproductive. What we need to be doing is following our natural ultradian rhythms. This is a cycle that runs from higher to lower mental alertness every 90 minutes throughout the day. Schwartz says we should take meaningful breaks after every 90 minutes of work. He himself has a routine that sees him have breakfast after his first 90 minutes, jog after his second, and lunch after his third. It makes sense to work this way. It’s how athletes train. They work hard in short bursts and then rest. So for me no more sitting glued to my computer for a couple of hours without a break.

Finally, I’ve started to read You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier, the father of  virtual reality technology. Lanier’s provocative book is a passionate call to reclaim our individual humanity from the  anonymous hive mind of the digital world.  Beware of “cybernetic totalism,” he warns. I’m only a third of the way through the book and already I’m beginning to look at social networking with a much more critical eye.

Well, enough for today. I’m shutting down my computer and going for a good brisk walk. I’ll drink deeply of the sweet spring air, talk to the odd neighborhood cat, and smile at strangers.

CLICK !

Image by Florin  Hatmanu

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