One of the most rewarding things about being a part of Voices of the Past is meeting all of the wonderful people who are using new media to inspire connections to heritage values throughout the world.  Recently, I was fortunate to visit with the wonderful Lisa Louise Cooke of the Genealogy Gems blog and podcast. Lisa exudes positive energy, and we’re fortunate that she’s passed some of that on to Voices of the Past with the Kreativ Blogger award.

The purpose of this award is to recognize bloggers that are making a difference and give them a tool to personally connect to their audiences. As part of this, I have to reveal seven things you may not know about me:

1. Appropriate for the season: I have nearly 40 snowman candles. The collection began when I was five and continued as various folks gifted me with these candles over the course of several Christmases. Since realizing the coincidence, I’ve continued adding to the collection each year.
2. The animal in me is a bat.
3. After decades of thinking it was the world’s most insane sport, I recently took up boxing.
4. I’m obsessed with the television show Mad Men and can quote lines from each episode.
5. I nearly died of a rattlesnake bite when I was three years old. Still have a depression from the bite in my right foot.
6. My five-year-old regularly challenges me to philosophical arguments, most of which end with me telling her “go play.”
7. I recently discovered by accident that I’m descended from an overseer whose journals are the basis for most of what we know about 19th century plantation culture in my area.

And now it’s my turn to extend the Kreativ Blogger award to seven bloggers I admire. These folks challenge my thinking, broaden my horizons and make me laugh.

1. http://pasthorizons.com – the authoritative resource for archaeology news, presented with the latest web technologies.
2. http://sherritalley.com – A TV news anchor in my area whose blog is a pure hoot.
3. http://myhometownohio.blogharbor.com/ – A statewide blog run by a Facebook buddy who shares my obsession with helping folks communicate heritage online.
4. http://dancull.wordpress.com/ – The geekiness of conservation made fascinating. Plus, he’s British.
5. Terry Hershey blog – The weekly Sabbath Moment instantly lowers my blood pressure 10 points. Read it and … pause.
6. http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/ – Authored by the first person I ever interviewed for this site. The gold standard for writing and thought leadership in a heritage blog.
7. http://lorelle.wordpress.com/ – Fairy Blogmother to me and too many others to name. She literally gave “Voices of the Past” its name, and defines what it means to be a blogger that makes a difference in the lives of people.

Thanks to you for joining us for the Voices of the Past journey in 2009. We look forward to bringing you more of the best heritage bloggers and new media professionals in the coming year.

Throughout the world, people are connecting about heritage preservation issues on an unprecedented level. One of the ways they are doing this is through “social media,” the term applied to online tools that inspire conversation and interaction. These tools are generally both easy to use and free.

The web address below will take you to ten questions regarding how you use the web and your perceptions of how social media may be used to improve the work of those involved in heritage professions. This anonymous questionnaire is one part of an ongoing study on the topic. This is an open link, so please feel free to forward copies to your colleagues.

Thank you in advance for taking 5-10 minutes out of your day to participate. Your feedback will help evaluate information and training needs for these topics in the context of heritage preservation. The questionnaire will be active through the end of 2009 and results will be shared through a Creative Commons license.

http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e2j8ohvffw3oqr2z/start

Photo by Dom Dada on Flickr

In a world where heritage values are challenged by the economy yet empowered with new media, blogger Sabra Smith faces these developments head-on and relates her own journey through the blog, “My Own Time Machine.“

1. How did you begin blogging?

I’ve been blogging elsewhere since 2004 and was amazed at the potential the Internet offers for creating community and making connections. Working as a preservation advocate at a nonprofit, I saw a need for a matchmaking place where people and “buildings in need” could come together. A blog seemed like an ideal way to raise awareness of places to try to keep them from becoming endangered in the first place, or, if need be, alert the cavalry if help was needed. I started “My Own Time Machine” when I was laid off in May 2009 (the economic downturn has hit nonprofits as well as corporations).

2. What do you mean when you describe your blog being a “newfangled time machine?”

Well, I think we’ve seen that history can be compelling and find a place in popular culture – just look at the success of a film like “National Treasure” or Dan Brown’s novels and film adaptations (The DaVinci Code sold 80 million copies worldwide and his new record-breaking book sold 1 million copies in a single day. I predict the D.C. historic sites that are part of the plot will see an increase in visitation!).

Those books and films use history to capture people’s imaginations. History needs to be more than a list of dates and dead people – and this is still the default presentation at too many historic sites. So, in thinking about how to make history more approachable, my idea was to try and demonstrate that “history” is just a term we use for daily living that used to be – if you think about it, we’re living in tomorrow’s history now.

Our world, and the context in which we live, might change, but I think people’s basic hopes and fears don’t change very much. In my graduate thesis, I made this point sharing a portion of a letter written by Elizabeth Willing Powel, a wealthy Philadelphia socialite and confidante of George Washington. Writing to her sister, she described “spasms and pains in my Head,” which she blamed on her husband’s fondness for large fires in the fireplace, but which he dismissed simply as her “bad Nerves.” Though she may have lived long ago and far away in time, it could just as easily be a modern domestic scene of bickering husband and wife.

This sort of time collapse really hit home for me while going through my great-grandfather’s papers. I never met him, but his journals revealed that he dreamed of owning his own business. He studied hard, saved his money and achieved his goal of owning his own mill. But then I found the truth of his dream tucked inside a worn envelope. There were three letters, addressed to his wife, apparently written in case something happened to him. They all basically said the same thing, advice and a sort of apology because life had been hard and he hadn’t been able to provide the things he’d hoped. One of them was so worn it was falling apart along the fold lines. I imagined him carrying it with him every day, tucked in a pocket, just in case. It brings me to tears every time I read it. How is it that a piece of paper from 20 years before I was born can affect me in that way? Because it feels like I am alive in that moment when I read it.

So, when I was thinking of a name for the blog, I wondered how I’d get people to come with me on these journeys. How could I coax them to come meet people that could be their neighbors except for the passage of time? And I thought of H.G. Wells and his time machine. And Sherman and Peabody and the Wayback Machine. And I figured I needed my own time machine. (And I described it using the word “newfangled” because I like the oxymoron of a word some old codger would use – that stereotype of preservation — combined with a futuristic modern tool for meanderings through time.)

3. How can the past be approachable and how is your blog helping make that happen?

I think a great purpose of history is to inform the present. We can make it relevant for people today by connecting it to current events or by capturing modern imaginations. Philadelphia has a wonderful program, aimed at kids, called “Once Upon a Nation” where kids travel to 13 stations around Independence Mall. At each storytelling bench, they hear a tale connected to that location. The experience is interactive, it fires the imagination, it challenges young minds to put a historical event in the context of how they live today. I know it’s a successful program because my own children clamor each summer to make sure I take them! We’ve heard stories about ghost riders, bank robbers, baseball, and eating your vegetables that conveyed lessons about the Revolutionary War, the Constitution or life in Colonial times. I’m trying to do something similar with the blog – make these sorts of connections between past and present, or simply put historical things into modern context. For example, I did a post on the Transformers movie that came out this summer and the Philadelphia-area historical sites it featured – up there on the screen along with the great pyramids and the Temple at Petra. Who’d expect a bunch of robots from outer space to show up on a blog about history and architecture? And that’s sort of my point. There is a connection to be made.

4. How do you define the concepts of history and preservation?

Well, to my kids, I am history. When the elder one was smaller, he asked me what things were like in Colonial Times – there’s a child’s perspective on “history.” And I confess I’ve fallen into the trap of saying things like “well, in my day, we didn’t have ipods — you had to listen to the radio or a record!” (Do you think “history” happens faster now because of technological advances?)

I grew up in lots of little towns, mostly in New England. History was all around – I remember analyzing the walls, stairs and space of one 18th century house we rented because I was sure it probably had a secret passageway (none that I ever found) yet that was contrasted with contemporary history in the making, like the moon walk or even an object from my father’s dresser like the radiation exposure meter he wore onboard nuclear submarines (I venture to claim to be one of the few children in the world who celebrated their birthday party aboard a nuclear submarine during the Cold War). Once my father retired and I started helping him research family history, I became very conscious of a timeline of history and my ancestors placed, like little push pins, along that long stretch of time.

Now, as for “preservation” I am still attempting to define that word for myself. Is it about freezing time? Capturing history? Finding stability in a changing world? Collecting mementos of a time past? Is it about art and style (reflected in architecture) and their ability to contribute to the character of a neighborhood? Does it refer to the ability of a building to tell a story about the way things used to be? If the Eskimos can have so many words to refer to “snow” I don’t know why we have only this one inefficient word – “preservation” – that attempts to describe so much.

In some respects, this is probably a culmination of lifelong interests – historical fiction, art books, photography, films with a strong sense of place. When I lived in NYC I found myself studying buildings, looking up at cornices and fenestration patterns more than any tourist. I loved the urban patterns and the way each neighborhood felt like its own place and had its own stories.

Then I moved to Philadelphia and observed its strange dependence on the story of Independence while admiring its remarkable portfolio of buildings of all vintages. When I got divorced there was a moment of “what now?” that forced me to focus on my interests to find a new direction for my life. It seemed logical for a building lover to go back to school for a masters in historic preservation. What bliss to read, write, draw, photograph and study building form, theory and history. And there was a moment when I realized that to get anyone else to care about a building, it wasn’t enough to slap a curatorial label on it – Building x, by Architect z: Note egg and dart molding and fine example of Greek revival pediment – I felt there was a need to put that building in context of who lived there, who walked by and thought of it as a dream house, who worked in it, what happened to it after that person was gone, etc. etc. I’m in this field in a time when the Colonial Dames are dying off, the money is drying up and no one wants to go to a historic house museum that celebrates a doorknob just because it was made in 1767.

5. How else do you use the Internet to communicate your ideas and thoughts on heritage?

I love reading other blogs, I check the National Trust for Historic Preservation site for current issues, see Flickr for photosharing and armchair visiting, and use Facebook for passing along links I like or trying to get people mobilized to support an issue like tax credits for homeowner restorations. I adore that Google books makes it possible for me to browse a 1919 edition of the Architectural Record and seeing what buildings and architects were being reviewed. (It’s fascinating to read a scathing review of an architect we now revere.)

6. How did you first become interested in heritage issues?

I’ve had some funny conversations with colleagues in the field of historic preservation about how we got where we are. As near as I can figure it, it’s our parents’ fault. They dragged us to too many antique shops and odd little historic house museums when we were at an impressionable age. And more than one of us was profoundly affected by those historic sites of our childhood that featured those creepy manikins – you know what I mean, a smiling 1950s plaster model dressed in colonial attire, wig askew on its head, standing in the one room schoolhouse. There was something both sinister and engaging about those stilted displays.

It’s actually hard to say. It may have been the time I spent in a small New England village, with the wonderfully carved gravestones in the picturesque cemetery and the white church towering over the village green, and the aforementioned one-room school house across from the National Historic Landmark prison dating from the 17th century. It may also have been my Seventh grade English teacher, who gave me Jack Finney’s Time & Again to read. In the story, a government program experiments with time travel and the protagonist finds himself in Victorian New York City, climbing the Statue of Liberty torch on display in Central Park and caught up in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. My teacher took the class on its own time travelling trip to a tiny pocket of Victoriana in downtown Honolulu. She and the book both captured my imagination in a way that stayed with me. Now here I am with my own time machine!

7. How do can other people can contribute to your efforts?

Well, I’d really like to see people have conversations in the comments section, sharing experiences and opinions. If I feature a historical site or society archive, it would be great if others would visit and report back what they discovered. I’d love to see the Bulletin Board become a real sort of marketplace, finding owners to adopt sites in need, matching nonprofits who need assistance with someone willing to provide it – and not just for people who might call themselves preservationists, but anyone. So “historic preservation” can become more mainstream – in fact, I’d like people to help come up with a new name that better captures all the wonderful things that “historic preservation” is really about.

For three years now, Michael Phillips has had a dream that he hopes will someday spread to the rest of the world: to create “sense of place” with video. It seems the tech world has helped set the stage for that dream, incorporating video functionality into everything from mobile phones and music players. With his website and blog, iGuidez, Phillips provides a template for capturing and sharing special sites for netizens everywhere to enjoy. In this interview, Michael Phillips talks about how he developed iGuidez, and the challenges of running a heritage website.

Welcome to the Voices of the Past podcast. I’m Jeff Guin, and today I’m talking to Michael Phillips of the heritage travel site, iGuidez.

Guin: Michael, welcome to the podcast. I was wondering if you would just start by telling us what iGuidez was designed to do.

Phillips: My experience as a traveler has been that guide books only ever give you a paragraph or two or sometimes even a few sentences about a famous sculpture or a church or anything like that on a local level. And therefore, I was always one that I wanted more information, I wanted to know more about what I could go to see rather than think, “Oh, this is really those three stars or four stars, so I have got to go see it,” whereas maybe it’s not in your taste at all. So I’ve been trying to get more concentrated information out about single items that you can go and see on a local level.

iGuidez is all about local information. I am trying to explain things better with video and photos and written text all in the one page as you see on my website.

Guin: Alright, well, how did you come up with the name for your site?

Phillips: Ah, that was easy. It was a fluke. I mean, as you might appreciate yourself, trying to get a name for anything on the Internet these days is virtually impossible. So it took me a long time at the previous name I had was JungleJam.tv, basically because I couldn’t find another name. And then one day, I just had upon iGuidez with a zed, you know so, it just came. It just happened like that.

Guin: Obviously this is a mission for you. You’re kind of looking at this as your calling. What experiences in your past led you to create the site, just the concept for iGuidez?

Phillips: Well, as I have said, I have traveled a lot. I am interested in the history, but not interested in history for history’s sake. And I am more of a–I suppose you could say–history in a social context, and that when I go around to see things, I want to know what was the artist thinking when they created something, or what was the designer or architect thinking when they designed a building or such. So it kind of evolved initially from a point of view of traveling somewhere and letting other people know what’s there. The most difficult thing about iGuidez that it took me a couple of years to create is how do you put so much information about one thing on a website, on a web page. So, it’s taken a year, two years to develop that method. And as I said, it all comes from traveling.

Guin: Well, were you a web designer in a previous life? Is that what you do professionally? Are you a tech person?

Phillips: I am actually an aircraft engineer, but that had nothing to do with the website itself. No, I just picked up basic HTML code as I began three, four years ago and various different websites. But then as it got more complicated and because it was video, I then had to employ certain people along the way. So the website now, I pay somebody to develop it to my ideas and designs. It’s a very expensive option. I mean, I wish I could do it myself because I would save a lot of money. I am only doing it because I can’t sit down and learn the website coding and also be out and making videos because it just doesn’t go. A lot of people have always said to me, “Why don’t you learn the coding then?” But then of course, who would be making the videos?

Guin: Exactly. And we know that the web is about the content, it’s not so much the look of the site, although good design is important, but there are some just very basic blogs that are very, very popular using the standard default WordPress template. It is about the content. What’s your experience with videography? Is it something you have done professionally in the past or is it something you have taken up as a professional hobby?

Phillips: Actually no. I have had no experience whatsoever in videography or photography or any of that at all … Having lived in Italy for four and a half years, in the world’s center of art, it’s hard to describe. You can’t write about art. You just can’t. It doesn’t translate as well, no matter how good a writer you are. So you have to show photographs; you have to show images, you know? So again, it was just playing around with video and thinking. Video is also much quicker. You put one photograph up of a piece of art and that’s it. Now you have to say something; write something about it. Whereas if you use a video, you can take much more art in and you can talk about it at the same time. So you are letting the images speak for themselves. So it was really just trial and error.

Guin: OK, well, you’ve got your blog established and your website, and they look great and they are very informative. But have you branched out to other forms of social media and using the web tools to communicate with your audience as well?

Phillips: Yes, I use Twitter as much as I can. I did have Facebook account a while ago, but I gave it up because you have your normal email and then you have the social media and then you have say the blog and the website, and it just gets so complicated and then you lose track of everything. I had to streamline everything. So I just use my blog on the website and Twitter as I can.

Guin: OK. Well, what does Twitter do for you as far as being able to promote your site and communicate with people that are interested in your blog?

Phillips: Well actually, that is a very good question. I asked myself that question when Twitter was all the go many months ago. I looked at it several times and I couldn’t think how am I going to use it because I’m not one of these people that I want to blog about me or my experiences. I wanted to use it for my website and I couldn’t figure out how. And then it just occurred to me one day: “I know what I’ll do, every time that I see something interesting or I make an interesting video or I add something to my blog, I can then update it on Twitter.” I do and sometimes it catches on. Sometimes it can be very useful, not always of course. And plus, the benefit of Twitter, as you have realized yourself, it is very quick. You just say what you have to say and press return and it goes out to everybody and that’s it. You don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to, like a blog, you don’t have to sit down and concentrate what you’re going to write or what you’re going to do. You just get on with it, and that’s again the advantage of it.

Guin: I am sure you spend some time on the Internet using resources on the web other than just your site or something directly related to it. What sites do you most enjoy?

Phillips: Well, I really enjoy TechCrunch. And I use a few similar sites. One called NI Tech Blog, which is a local one in Belfast. What I use them for is just to keep abreast of any announcements or anything that comes up similar to my website … just to know what technology comes online, or who’s moving or who’s doing what on the travel industry. And sometimes I do contact people through those websites to ask for collaboration and things like that.

At the beginning when I started of a couple years ago when I was getting more into the research and the information, I used to use Wikipedia a lot, but then I suddenly realized it has a very very short life span because there’s not a lot on Wikipedia with regards to specific information on local things. Now if you are talking about famous landmarks or points of interest, there is plenty. But not on local things. … There is one local website at home, the historian website that occasionally I use if I am back home and I am researching information.

Guin: As you demonstrate, there are different types of heritage sites and heritage blogs, and there can be photo blogs and there can be video blogs as well, and I’m amazed at all the content that you’ve got on your site. How long has it been in existence?

Phillips: Just over three years. I kind of kicked in again about travel. It was travel-oriented. And then in the last year, year and a half, it got really concentrated with information in that I want to show the information that I’ve researched about the particular subject that I happen to be videoing. That’s where I’m at today.

Guin: OK, well, explain how the site works. Is there anyway that people who enjoy your site and kind of connect to your mission can help you create more content for the site?

Phillips: Oh yes, definitely … One of the points of this website is to create a model. Again, if I hark back to that model of Wikipedia, I want to try to create some way so that I have the model to show other people how to do this, and of course, yes, I’d love people to copy what I’m doing. Again, just as in Wikipedia, there are rules and regulations. There is no point in just going around and videoing something and then talking about it, because that may not make a lot of sense. So I am looking to collaborate with people, and I am contacting travel organizations and travel websites and various technology companies even to explore ways how to develop this further. Not just from my point of view, but also in trying to get other people involved. So certainly, I mean, that’s an open question. Yes, I would love help because as much as I’d love to do everything myself, I can’t.

Guin: I understand completely. OK, then let’s use for example, let’s say there is a small Main Street organization here in the US, and they want to do some video or landmark documentaries on their particular town. Do you have any pointers for actually undertaking a project like that?

Phillips: Yes I do. In fact I occasionally have a blueprint of instructions for how to do it. For example, the videoing is not a difficult thing to learn how to do. And what I mean by that is, where do you start when you go into a room to video? Now I can explain that very easily. You just say: start at the entrance and you walk around in a clockwise direction or a counterclockwise, it doesn’t matter, and video as much as you can. So there are basic things like that you can explain with video. The much more difficult thing to explain is how do you get the information? Where do you get the information? Because if it is quite a popular thing or a famous landmark then it is not a problem. There is plenty of information out there, and even, for example, guide books, local guidebooks can even tell you as much as you need to know. But it’s things that aren’t well known that are probably even more historic; that have more value in a historic sense, and it’s trying to integrate that information onto the video in a way that makes sense.

Guin: Alright, well, if someone is interested in doing this, is there a place on your website they can go for more information or can they contact you?

Phillips: They certainly can. If they contact me, I’ll be happy to collaborate with anybody on this theme. I will certainly help anybody as much as I can because it’s in everybody’s interest to develop this, not just mine of course.

Guin: Tell us what your grand vision is for the future of this site, either in the next year or going into the long term. What do you hope for?

Phillips: Well … this is my calling, I think. It certainly feels like it. Although, with most personal missions, they never pay. So, I need something for that to change because it has taken everything off me. So I need some sort of commercial backing to help me along. I am trying to work with certain city councils in Belfast and also in Bologna because I have those two cities are very well covered. One other ambitious task at the moment is that I have made contact with the tourist board in Rome quite a few months ago, and they were very enthusiastic about my project because, I have covered Bologna (15:53) so much now and I have so much content on Bologna that I can’t really do much more. So I want to expand to the likes of Rome where I can actually meet more tourists myself when I’m on the street and they have taken us on board and have now passed it on to one of the government ministers.

Guin: Where are you from? I’m not recognizing an Italian accent there.

Phillips: Oh no, definitely, Belfast.

Guin: Do you consider Bologna your home base?

Phillips: I use Bologna as a model to create my video guides, and then of course I copied that over to Belfast every time I went home. So now that I have completed my mission there in Bologna, I need to move somewhere where it will have a greater significance and that will be the likes of Rome or in fact, it could be any big, any major city, but I know the Italian way now. I like the culture there obviously, and the standard of life, so I am happy to just to move to another city.

Guin: Well, is there anything else that you need to say about iGuidez or do you have any other web endeavors that you’re pursuing?

Phillips: God, you know, this is enough at the moment. Let me move forward with this before I go on to another one.

Guin: Alright, you kind of actually, if you have been doing it three years, you kind of got in it about the time that social media was just hitting. It is kind of the dawn of the revolution so to speak. So a lot of these social media tools weren’t even in existence then.

Phillips: Exactly. In fact, I was one, if not the first, to start making video guides. I draw a lot of inspiration from Wikipedia; drew a lot of inspiration from that then and thinking, there’s a lot of people collaborating together on knowledge. And I thought, it took me a while to think, well how could I create something that could be also equally valuable to somebody, you know? So again, that is what I want to do as well to draw upon other people’s experience and knowledge and try to put them all onto one database, so that other people can actually learn from it and actually see and experience it more. Whereas Wikipedia is text-based, not to devalue it in any sense or criticize it, it is just text. And how do you move that on to the 21st century? And that is what I think video is all about.

Guin: Well most people are visual. There have been a lot of studies about that and especially in today’s world with all of the digital distractions, that’s the only way to really capture the imaginations of anyone, but especially the younger folks. And those are the ones that we need to instill the heritage values into.

Phillips: That’s right. And there was even just a last point: there was an article written by the Times, the Sunday Times here in London about six months ago. In fact, I even have it quoted it on my website in the about page, and it says that the journalists find that everyone appreciates that Google is the number one search engine, but what few people expected was that YouTube became the second biggest search engine. And what that translates as that people are looking for videos for information now. They are looking into video websites for actual information, and that’s an extremely powerful thing if you think about it. Which means that anybody who actually has relevant information in a video, that someday is going to be worth a lot.

Guin: Alright, well, I think I am going to go ahead and wrap it up. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Phillips: And to you as well.

Guin: And that was Michael Phillips of the heritage travel site, iGuidez. Now if you would like to learn more about Michael and iGuidez, you can check out our shownotes site. That’s Voicesofthepast.org. You can find a transcript of this interview. While you are there, check out our 2.0 tips for how to use social media to advance heritage in your part of the world. Until next time, this is Jeff Guin for Voices of the Past, and we’ll see you online.

Sometimes the needs of a heritage group extend beyond the simple need to convey information. Blogs and Facebook fan pages allow limited interactivity. But for groups whose members are intensely passionate about a topic, a free social networking site like Ning could be the way to go.

So what is Ning, and who is using it to talk about heritage?

Essentially, Ning allows you to create your very own Facebook, complete with groups, design customization, forums, RSS capability and individual profile pages that incorporate blogs. There are also multimedia sharing functions whereby members can upload photos and videos.

According to Quantcast.com, an estimated 6.8 million people access Ning a month. Far fewer than Facebook, but you have to consider the quality of communication going on in these sites. Unlike the “drive-by” communication common to Facebook, Ning flourishes when ongoing, intense discussion is needed on a topic.

Compared to other social networking sites, Ning provides the a solid platform for effective, good-looking sites with minimal effort, according to TechCrunch.

There are several general factors to consider before starting a Ning site.

Pros:

• You have an instant social network with a lot of the functionality of Facebook and your own brand
• It’s customizable with colors, graphics and typefaces
• There are a variety of privacy options for the site and for individual users
• Feature set is continually improved.
• Ability to track your web statistics through Google Analytics

Cons:

• Unless your potential membership is highly prolific and motivated, you will have to manage your community intensively to keep the participation level up.
• Once the information is in Ning, you can’t readily export it to another platform (like a blog).
• There are hundreds of social sites out there and many folks are fatigued with signing up for them.
• While Ning is improving, there will still be some instances (like getting a photo to show up in a post) where a rudimentary knowledge of HTML code is helpful.
• It’s also your responsibility to deal with spambots and members behaving badly.

Participation often comes in waves. This may be affected by a major news item, event or recognition by other sites and blogs. Just prepare yourself for it.

Heritage organizations worldwide have joined Ning to share their values. Here are a few examples:

Natchitoches Preservation Network (collaborative small town heritage site)

Natchitoches, La., the first permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase territory, is home to more than 30 organizations dealing with heritage issues. These organizations have long worked together to preserve the town’s historic legacy. While each has had its own website (often several years out of date) and publicity methods, the duplicate efforts wasted the energy of these organizations.

Ning was used to create the Natchitoches Preservation Network site.

The 151-member site uses groups and blogs to keep the community apprised of various heritage events and informs them of ongoing research and volunteer opportunities. Blog posts include anything from Community Cemetery Cleaning Day to thesis project presentations by Heritage Resources Students at nearby Northwestern State University of Louisiana.

The site also makes use of RSS and embedding of other social media to enhance the experience. It includes a virtual library of links from the social bookmarking service Delicious. It also incorporates a Friendfeed group that allows members to add news stories related to Natchitoches heritage from other sites, embedding them on the front page.

Members post photos and videos about events and places around the parish including the a series of “This Place Matters” videos in which individuals explain the importance of their favorite landmarks around the parish.

The site was also used to communicate intern research hosted at the National Center for Preservation Technology an Training during the summer. The interns blogged to the Natchitoches community weekly about the progress with their projects and how the projects benefit them as a community. They then presented their research at the end of the summer during the event “Preservation in Your Community.”

Heritage is more than just ensuring that a place matters, some heritage individuals find their passion preserving more intangible aspects, such as the art of music.

GenealogyWise (Genealogy Research)

Genealogy is one of humankind’s favorite hobbies. We all want to know what makes us “us.” Not surprisingly, there are numerous genealogy networks on Ning. GenealogyWise is one of the largest. With more than 14,000 members and 3,000 groups, it’s very active. Using its group function, it also includes an interesting method for people to connect: by surname. The groups also tackle specific topics such as dating photos and outdoor genealogy. Nearly 400 videos (many of which are how-tos) have been posted. And to help the large membership connect, the site also holds scheduled live chats.

Museum 3.0 (Discussions on museums in the digital age)

Museum 3.0 poses the question, “What will the museum of the future be like?” More than 1,600 people from all over the world have joined in seeking an answer to this question.

The forums serve as their discussion board for a variety of topics including the future of the audio tour, new virtual tours on different sites, Twitter as a business tool and museum-related surveys.

Museum 3.o also uses the events function of Ning to promote different conferences, seminars and networking opportunities.

Museum 3.0 also uses Ning’s video and image sharing opportunities to post more than 500 images from different museums and about 50 videos ranging from interviews to museum-related speeches to videos depicting the “Reel Texas Cowboys.”

But heritage is not something that needs to be simply left to professionals. With social networking sites like Ning, heritage values are now in the hands of the individual.

For some, Ning enables them to research their family heritage and unit individuals globally giving them one centralized place to share aspects of their lives.  The families use their Ning sites to post family photos and videos, discuss family reunions and also research their family trees.

Regardless of the heritage you find important, let it be community heritage or your own family’s history, Ning enables you to share it all globally with folks who share those same values at the click of a button.

The sites we’ve covered are only a sampling of what’s out there. We’d love to hear your thoughts on your favorite heritage-focused Ning sites.

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In the world of heritage bloggers, Dr. Anthony Cagle is virtually ancient. According to his site “Archaeoblog,” he has been serving up old news since January 2004. And while he frequently offers insight on all facets of archaeology, he’s not afraid to throw in a bit of personal insight as well. Just take a moment to contemplate his Ode to Beer. Tony recently visited with Voices of the Past to talk about how he got in on the ground floor of the blogging revolution and what it takes to sustain a heritage blog for the long haul.

You were kind of the Lone Ranger in the archaeology profession when you began blogging. What compelled you to communicate in this way?

Short version: I saw Glenn Reynolds on his Instapundit blog getting a gazillion hits a day just for typing “Heh” and thought “Hey, I could do that.”

Long version: I’ve been messing around on the Internets since the ‘80s when it was just e-mail and BBSs on university computer terminals and I was just starting graduate school in archaeology. Then when the Web got going in the ‘90s, I participated in online discussion for mostly information technology (IT) based ones (I put myself through grad school doing statistical programming for the local public health department). I also played around on a couple of the start-up e-zine fora that were more oriented towards the general public, mostly by following the IT forum hosts to their new digs. So I’ve been swimming in the rough-and-tumble online world for a while and enjoyed interacting via the written word in this sort of rapid-response world.

Once weblogging came into vogue, I looked around and didn’t see much in the way of interactive web-based archaeological sites (pun intended). There were archaeological sites aplenty but they were the sort of top-down information-imparting sites that academics prefer. Academic archaeologists tended to prefer (still do, mostly) private email listservs for discussing purely academic topics, and creating web sites that largely mimicked their class structures. The reason I and so many others like blogs is both the interactive aspects – through both reader comments and other blogs – and the rapid updating that’s possible. You can not only post a link to an article or another blog post, but you can critically comment on it (positively or negatively), update it with later comments and links, and get reader comments that add very different perspectives.

I also thought that professional archaeologists were not doing the greatest job communicating with the general public about their work. I’m not the first one to think this and I readily acknowledge the difficulties involved. Academic archaeologists, especially those without tenure and just beginning their careers, are working in a very complicated environment in which all of their professional work is being scrutinized by their peers either explicitly or implicitly. In most cases, scientists tend to give their colleagues something of a stink-eye when one of them “goes popular” and attempts to communicate with the general public; it’s the cost of necessarily simplifying the field and developing the persona necessary to connect with ‘just plain folks’. John Hawks, a now-tenured physical anthropologist at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madision, has talked about this a lot on his blog.

The alternative is leaving the business of popularizing archaeological work to reporters and others with limited technical knowledge, or those with an axe to grind. In steps the Web wherein one can directly interact with both peers and the general public on an equal level and with the time and space available to get as detailed as you want.

What is your intended “mission” for ArchaeoBlog?

First and foremost to provide an outlet for my need to blather on and on about whatever interests me. Yeah, it’s somewhat narcissistic, but that only extends as far as my hit counter indicates. The Internet is the great leveler that way.

But at base it’s really pretty simple: learning new stuff, both for me and for readers. I chose to be a general interest archaeology blog rather than concentrate on a narrow subject because. . .well, just because. I read the science journals to find out what’s going on in some depth in my chosen areas of interest and I blog to get a broader sense of what’s going on out there.

In a way, it’s like that old adage about teaching: if you want to learn about something, teach a class in it. I had a professor back in graduate school that served a stint on the National Science Foundation reviewing grant applications and he told us that during his time on the panel reading all those grant applications for an incredible variety of archaeological work, he had never felt as tuned-in to the wider world of archaeology as he did then. It sounds rather trite and cliché, but the best way to learn is by reading and talking a lot, and ArchaeoBlog lets me do both of those, and I hope it provides an opportunity for readers to do the same.

So I really try to post a lot of links to news articles that I find interesting or significant and that I think others will find interesting and significant, links to online academic papers that those with an interest can look at for themselves, and provide whatever technical commentary I have. I occasionally post an extended treatise on some subject or other that I happen to be working on, but I’m more of the Linking School of blogging.

You’re quite prolific. How do you keep content flowing on your blog?

Like everyone else: Wherever and whenever I come across something online. I have a couple of news-aggregator tools from the search engines that email me archaeology-related links (mostly from mainstream news outlets), academic listservs, reader email, some of the other fora that I post to. Archaeologica also has a daily news feed. And I review the odd TV program, book, or movie with archaeological links as well. Mostly, I try to provide links, links, and more links. When I first started I felt the need to link to absolutely everything I saw that had anything vaguely to do with archaeology; I eventually cut that down to items that have enough content so that they actually say something, or that were either generally significant, or that just plain interested me for whatever reason.

Of course, I also post on subjects I happen to be working on currently. I recently began doing a volunteer project at a local cemetery recording the older monuments for conservation and just to have a record of what is inscribed on them. I decided to do the entire data collection digitally on a PDA, no paper involved at all (I hate data entry with the heat of a thousand suns) so I’ve done a few posts on how that process has worked and what I’ve been finding. Some of the monuments have inscriptions in languages with which I am unfamiliar and ArchaeoBlog readers have provided information on the language and possible translations. And I occasionally dip into my own archive of field photos and do a post on what is being shown, what it meant at that particular site, etc.

I don’t limit myself to strictly archaeological topics either. I also post at another blog, Car Lust, and occasionally include some of that content at ArchaeoBlog. I also venture into old albums, old TV shows – the recent Land of the Lost remake provided ample fodder for posting – and movies, and a recent fascination I had with shaving. I’ve also posted on some personal stuff like my various house remodels, car remodels (I have a 1978 Mustang II that I did some restoration and modifications on), and various topics involving my array of felines. I try to avoid the latter since constantly chattering away about cats is the quickest way to bore non-cat people (of which I consider myself to be one, thank you very much) to death. Granted, cute cat pictures tend to drive traffic, but one must maintain some semblance of decorum. I usually try to work some archaeological angle into things, even if but for humorous effect.

Ann Althouse, a law prof at the University of Wisconsin, is a master at this. Although she has seemingly posted less and less on strictly law topics, she used to sprinkle non-law posts in with her generally Constitutional law discussions and the format made her extremely popular. Of course, she also poss on that great traffic-generator, politics, which I won’t touch with a ten foot. . .errr, trowel. Not that there’s no politics involved in either archaeology or heritage issues, but getting at all partisan is an easy way to stink up the place with vile comments. Heck, I got enough vile comments from an offhand comment making fun of shell middens. . .

What facet of archaeology most inspires your interest?

Finding out something about the past that no one knew before. That also sound rather trite and cliché as well, but really that’s what science is all about and why any of us got into it in the first place. The actual finding of artifacts is kind of fun, but that’s always been sort of ancillary for me; I can go into my back yard and dig up a rock no one has seen before so it’s not really the finding of stuff that interests me. I tend to view the archaeological record as data rather than objects of artistic or monetary (“treasure”) value. One of my favorite archaeologists is A.L. Kroeber, who invented the frequency seriation method of telling time in the absence of stratigraphy. For a generation of archaeologists it was the main way of structuring the way we view archaeological record and, via cultural history, is still a big part of how archaeology is done today. Contrast that with probably the most famous archaeological find of the twentieth century: Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. While spectacular, it really didn’t have much impact on the business of archaeology outside of Egypt. And unlike radiocarbon dating, which came out of physics, this was a strictly archaeological invention that treated artifacts as quantitative data rather than starting points for speculation about past lifeways. Its results were replicative, could be corroborated by other methods (stratigraphy and later radiocarbon dating), and is really one of the few methodological innovations attributable to archaeology alone. Of course, Petrie came up with a similar scheme in Egypt with his Sequence Dating and at roughly the same time, which is simply fascinating in its own right.

Of course, there are the field stories, too. In how many other professions can you relate how you stumbled back from a party in Karnak temple during the nightly sound and light show and had to suddenly duck behind a sphinx because the lights are coming on right where you were about to become an unwitting part of the show?

Err, or so I’ve heard that can happen.

You seem to have found your calling in archaeology. When did you first catch the archaeobug?

Oddly, it was never a lifelong passion. When I was a kid I was a dinosaur fanatic. Then in high school I gravitated to computer nerd-dom and even started out college as a computer science major. I started getting disenchanted with the actual business of computer science – did I want to write assembly language code to sort linked lists the rest of my life? Why, no, I didn’t – and as part of the ancillary classes in the Arts and Sciences school I took an introductory anthropology course. I latched on to bioanth and archaeology, wound up in a human skeletal anatomy lab class, took a bunch of other archaeology classes, and bingo, I found myself trying to explain to my parents what I was going to do with an archaeology degree. The Indiana Jones movies helped sell it (to me and to them I guess) and also reading Donald Johannsen’s book Lucy also sold me on it as well (even though it’s not technically archaeology).

Of course, instead of trouncing around the world finding cool stuff, I found myself measuring half a dozen attributes on hundreds of pieces of lithic debitage (which I guess is kind of the archeological equivalent of writing assembly language code to sort linked lists) but I actually liked that.

You started blogging at the dawn of the social media revolution. What’s your perspective on using new media tools to communicate heritage?

It opens up a whole new avenue of communication, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well. Instead of statically reading a book or watching a television program, people can now go online and interact with professionals involved in heritage issues, ask questions and get answers in quick order. They can also provide their own insights and that makes the communication process a two-way street. In a way, it’s a completion of the process that started with the printing press. Before, all people could do was talk with each other in a limited area. After, they could read things from people anywhere in the world, but not really talk back. Now, with the Internet we’ve completed the circle and people can read and respond to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Hence, we can now go online anytime and find out what people are doing with similar interests half a block or half a world away. I’ll give you an example. I started a volunteer project surveying and assessing older monuments at a local cemetery because I noticed, while taking some evening walks at the place, that some of them were looking pretty unreadable and it might not be too long before all of that information was lost. So I went online and looked for other people doing similar cemetery restorations and assessments to see what sort of data they collected, what was important for conservation, etc. Turns out there’s something of a cemetery restoration movement that’s been going on for the past few years and there’s an enormous amount of information out there on what other people have done, what to look for, the best ways to clean a monument without damaging it, etc. Most of the people doing it are non-professionals who had an interest in conserving these properties and learned the best methods for preserving them from the few professionals that were out there.

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit again) calls it an “Army of Davids”, which fits rather nicely into the archaeological/historical context here. There’s a lot of valuable work that amateurs can do and are doing to contribute to identifying and preserving archaeological and historic properties in their local communities. That’s very powerful.

How has blogging changed the way you think about communicating heritage?

First and foremost, I’ve learned that any issue benefits from communication. People have something to say and these issues shouldn’t be left to just “the experts” and the government. We all have a stake in preserving certain objects and areas, and really in determining what is worth preserving. I think most people are naturally interested in preserving certain aspects of history and will respond when they’re brought into the discussion early and often. There’s a lot of expertise out there that can be tapped into. Archaeologists and historians can’t cover the whole country, so we need to bring in the general public and let them contribute. I’ve learned a lot from commenters that you just don’t get from just talking to academics and such. It’s amazing how much you learn by just, you know, talking to each other.

My daughter turned five this past week and to celebrate, we invited her kindergarten class to her party. In the past, this has always just entailed nearby family, so we had no idea what we were in for. Luckily, our town has a gymnastics facility for young people that hosts birthday parties. Kids are led through structured gym activities both before and after all the sugar! We had Nazy Lacour create a doll cake again this year, and will continue to do so every year until she doesn’t care to anymore. It was a Tinker Bell cake, in keeping with the theme Kaleigh selected several months ago. The birthday went off splendidly, with everyone exhausted and happy. Me and my wife may just need another year to recover, though.