Paul Allen wrote an interesting article for the Desert News this week. The following is a teaser from the September 19, 2011 edition of the newspaper.
Paul goes on to write about mobile applications, social networks, and gamicication. Interesting…
The Internet has changed family history forever, making research faster, more affordable and more rewarding. In the next five years, that progress will only accelerate.
Digitization
Only a small fraction of the world’s genealogical records are online today. On April 17, 1997 we sold the first Ancestry.com subscriptions. We had 55 databases online with a total of about 110 million records. We signed up 50 subscribers the first day at $49.95 each. Today a subscriber to Ancestry.com gets hundreds of times as much content and value as they did in the beginning.
FamilySearch is digitizing all the records in its granite vaults. Millions of rolls of microfilm, captured in more than 100 countries since 1939, will be digitized, and then indexed by a massive volunteer force.Other non-profits, including Internet Archive and Allen County public library (one of the country’s largest genealogy libraries), are digitizing content.
Amazingly, Google plans to complete the scanning of all the world’s 135 million books by 2020. If anyone in your family tree was ever mentioned, it won’t be hard to find the source.
Linking
With abundant online content, computer scientists will invent automatic ways to intelligently find actual references to your ancestors and bring them to you – in some cases, without you having to perform a single search.As these linking tools are integrated into social networks like Facebook and Google+, living descendants will be able to comment about the meaning of each discovery:” Now I know why grandpa always told me to study math & science – this newspaper article says that when he was 16 he won a scholarship because of his math skills and that led him to university where he met grandma.”
