Heritage DIY: Create and Preserve your Family Tree the Web 2.0 Way

By Dylan Staley

Geni is a web based family tree maker that is using the idea of Web 2.0 and collaboration to make finding your long lost relatives easier. Geni, built by some of the people that brought you PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe, allows you to work with your family members on building your family tree. So, you may not know your second great grandmother’s husband’s name, but your grandmother’s sister may know, and Geni provides the platform to allow this knowledge to travel the great distances that often separate families.

Social Bookmarking: organize your online experience

Yahoo claims to have indexed some 20 billion web pages. With that much real estate on the web, how can you be assured you will ever find—and get back to—the information most relevant to you?

The answer is social bookmarking. And it’s not quite the same as the favorite birthday card you used to hold your spot in the novels you read over the summer. One of the most widely used of these tools is one called “Delicious.” Delicious is a free service that allows the user a web-based way to bookmark sites.