Today, Apple released Mac OS X Lion ($29.99 store | web­page). The oper­at­ing sys­tem is the sev­enth update in the OS X series (ver­sion 10.7), and it packs some of the most ground­break­ing changes into it. For the first time in his­to­ry, a wide­ly dis­trib­uted con­sumer, pro­sumer, and enter­prise oper­at­ing sys­tem is not avail­able on… Con­tin­ue read­ing Mac OS X Lion: A First Look

Pri­madesk, a new web­site in beta, allows you to man­age your cloud con­tent in Google (GMail, Google Docs, Picasa), Yahoo (Yahoo Mail, Flickr), Drop­box, Box.net, and about twen­ty oth­er ser­vices. This looks to be a pow­er­ful resource, though it will need to be faster for pow­er users. One of the most pow­er­ful fea­tures promis­es to… Con­tin­ue read­ing Cloud Man­age­ment — Pri­madesk

Raleigh’s WUNC Radio aired episodes in a series, North Car­oli­na Voic­es: The Civ­il War, dur­ing the mid­dle of June. The series includes pieces on the impact of the war on North Car­olini­ans and their fam­i­lies from the time of the Civ­il War until now. Thank­ful­ly, the episodes are avail­able for stream­ing and down­load­ing from the WUNC… Con­tin­ue read­ing North Car­oli­na Voic­es: The Civ­il War

There is one more day left in Ancesty.com’s free access week­end for the 4th of July. Ances­try is mak­ing appli­ca­tions to the Sons of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion appli­ca­tions, 1889 — 1970. These appli­ca­tions pro­vide detail about the ser­vice the ances­tor is report­ed to have per­formed to advance the cause of the Rev­o­lu­tion. (For SAR mem­ber­ship,… Con­tin­ue read­ing Ancestry’s 4th of July Free Access Week­end Con­tin­ues

If you have a fam­i­ly his­to­ry that you want to pub­lish, there are sev­er­al ways you can do this. Let’s assume for the moment that you want to pub­lish the book in print for­mat, but you don’t want to become a pub­lish­er or main­tain a lot of inven­to­ry. You want to make the book avail­able… Con­tin­ue read­ing Self-Pub­lish­ing

There is a lot of dis­cus­sion in the geneal­o­gy world about e‑books. Of course, there are large book dig­i­ti­za­tion projects: Google Books and Inter­net Archive being the two best known. (In 2008, Microsoft can­celled a book dig­i­ti­za­tion project that had scanned more than 750,000 books.) While Google has got­ten into some legal hot water by… Con­tin­ue read­ing Books in Browsers: Brew­ster Kahle and E‑Books

If any­thing, the rush to pro­vide con­tent in the cloud is begin­ning to speed up. On March 29th, Ama­zon announced its Cloud Dri­ve ser­vice, focus­ing on stor­age of MP3 audio files, which can be streamed from the web with Ama­zon’s Cloud Play­er. Cloud Dri­ve is able to store any dig­i­tal files. On May 10th, Google… Con­tin­ue read­ing Dream­ing of Clouds

Thomas MacEn­tee did a BlogTalkRa­dio inter­view with Jan Alpert, NGS 2011 Con­fer­ence Chair and Imme­di­ate Past Pres­i­dent of NGS and Julie Miller, CG, NGS 2012 Con­fer­ence Chair and Vice Pres­i­dent of the NGS. This was a rare behind-the-scenes inter­view with two lead­ers who have orga­nized and led con­fer­ences. It’s a rare look behind the scenes… Con­tin­ue read­ing Behind the Scenes at NGS 2011: Blog Talk Radio

I have become a fan of two com­pet­ing prod­ucts, Instapa­per and Read it Lat­er. These appli­ca­tions sit in your brows­er, and allow you to quick­ly archive a web­page for lat­er read­ing. They clean up the web­page, remov­ing ads and com­pli­cat­ed script­ing, so you just have the text you want to read. You can then read… Con­tin­ue read­ing Read it Lat­er vs. Instapa­per

I attend­ed the 2011 Nation­al Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety Fam­i­ly His­to­ry Con­fer­ence held in Charleston, South Car­oli­na this past week. I was pleased to have been asked to give three talks: The inau­gur­al Birdie Monk Holsclaw Memo­r­i­al Lec­ture (slides), a lec­ture on Google and search method­olo­gies (slides), and the NGS Gen­Tech Lun­cheon talk (slides), which was on… Con­tin­ue read­ing NGS 2011 Con­fer­ence in Charleston, South Car­oli­na