From merope@Radix.Net Mon Feb 12 12:45:18 2001 Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 12:45:12 -0500 (EST) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: In one ear and out the other...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! Monday 12 February 2001: Tim Stowell posts a notice from [former] Board Secretary Esse Frye, dated February 9. In in, Esse resigns as Board Secretary, effective immediately. Tim posts notice that USGenWeb has been awarded "the Best Site Pick for the month of January 2001" by the Genealogy Forum on AOL. The award reads "Your site has been chosen because of its comprehensive nature in providing research help to those searching their ancestry in the United States. USGenWeb is the premier site for doing United States research. Your volunteers have acheived such a major task through building sites for each county within the US. It is essential for anybody searching US genealogy to check the USGenWeb site for the counties researching to find information, databases, queries, etc. with possible leads to obtaining knowledge about one's family. This county by county approach is also providing much searched information in tombstone and census data. Volunteers of the Genealogy Forum find USGenWeb an essential resource in helping people with the US research." The award is currently listed at: http://www.genealogyforum.rootsweb.com/gfaol/bsp.htm [Yay! Congrats to us!] Shari Handley congratulates the project for this award, noting "For all our foibles, USGenWeb is still "the premier site for doing United States research"." === Snapshot Corner: For those of you interested in seeing pictures of the recent GenTech 2001 meeting, Holly Timm has posted her pictures at: http://www.rootsweb.com/~hft/gentech/ Pink Slip Corner: There is an interesting new interview posted at GenSuck today. The GenSuck guys interviewed Amy Roberts, who until recently was the affiliate program manager at Ancestry.com. She was pink slipped in the recent round of layoffs and she has some interesting things to say about life in the belly of the corporate beast. Particularly interesting was this comment: "As I spoken with different individuals at Ancestry, the affiliate program is being continually scrutinized by the upper management. It's cost of subscriber was always between $6 and $9, making it the lowest cost-per-subscriber bucket in the company. More time, not necessarily money, will be spent on it to see where and how far it can scale. At the same time, however, RootsWeb is being looked at to see if revenue can be made by its users. The company has to -- there is only so much money in the bank and Ancestry is the only money-generating site in the family. Anything that can be done to move people over to Ancestry will be done." [You have been warned.] The full interview is available at: http://www.gensuck.com/FEATURES/roberts/index.html === "I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right." ---Henry Bessemer This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved. From merope@Radix.Net Tue Feb 13 13:18:26 2001 Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 13:18:23 -0500 (EST) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: Holier than thou...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning* contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! Monday 12 February 2001: Rich Howland withdraws his resignation, citing as reasons "the overwhelming support of USGW members...Second the support and help of ILGenWeb to take some of the load...Thirdly the renewal of faith that there is hope." He notes that he received "a some what less than supportive e-mail from Bill Oliver" and when he explained his reasons for resigning, Bill was very supportive and "His offers of help and encouragement renewed my faith that different sides of USGenWeb can find some middle ground in which to united and work together in friendship." === Pinching Pennies Corner: A reader has told us that MyFamily.com will shortly begin charging users for web space over 5mbs [the former upper limit to free webspace was 75mbs, we believe]. This has come as a shock to the many folks who use their webspace to store dozens of resource-intensive family photos, and many of them are talking about giving up their pages or moving them to another service. Rumor has it the new fee will be somewhere in the vicinity of $20.00 per year. === "Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." --Demosthenes This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved. From merope@Radix.Net Sat Feb 17 14:40:41 2001 Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2001 14:40:40 -0500 (EST) From: merope Reply-To: merope To: Daily Board Show Subject: Daily Board Show Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes...its Your Daily Board Show! *warning contains editorial content. Read at your own risk! Friday 16 February 2001: Teri Pettit proposes that the new Board Secretary's duties include the posting each day of "a message to Board-L with a simple list of all the unclosed motions" and their status. She specifically includes tabled motions, noting "this Board seems to make little distinction between tabling a motion and voting it down...Most motions that have been "tabled indefinitely" should have simply been voted on. There is no good reason to table a motion if you don't intend to ever get back to it. Tabling is intended for situations where the group needs to await the results of some other process." By listing tabled motions each day, she hopes "to prod us into using tabling the way it is supposed to be used, rather than as a way to defeat a motion without really voting on it." She notes that including this duty means the Board Secretary would need to be someone who can log in every day. === Making it Official Corner: The USGenWeb Census Project has announced that it has applied for its own service mark. From their press release: "After considerable discussion, a decision was made by the Board of Directors to apply for the registration of a service mark (SM) of THE USGENWEB CENSUS PROJECT with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The application was made in the name of the nonprofit organization that was established to ensure the perpetual continuance of the project as a volunteer-centered venture. A primary reason the Board of Directors chose to apply for service mark protection was the recent decision of the Archives Census Project (ACP) to drop "Archives" from that project's name. By applying for service mark protection, we hope that there will be less confusion among volunteers and genealogical researchers as to the identities of each respective census project. The USGenWeb Census Project has always been recognized as the standard-bearer in the transcription of historical census information. The service mark protection will ensure that the researcher and transcriber alike will now be able to easily identify those transcriptions produced by the volunteers of The USGenWeb Census Project." This might turn up the heat a bit on the Census War front. A quick search of the USPTO database still turns up only Linda Lewis' application for the Archives, with status unchanged. Its possible that the CP has pre-empted any attempt by the Project Formerly Knows as the Archives Census Project to register its own mark. There's still no word on the status of the USGenWeb Project's own filing, but it appears they now have two competing applications to address. === "It's not to control, but to protect the citizens of Singapore. In our society, you can state your views, but they have to be correct." --Ernie Hai, co-ordinator of the Singapore Government Internet Project This has been your Daily Board Show. -Teresa Lindquist merope@radix.net ------- Daily Board Show, (c) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist, all rights reserved.