Trove Tuesday - I love Trove

This morning @TroveAustralia tweeted:

After reading that Tweet I realised that I hadn't been loving Trove on #TroveTuesday much lately. Sure I had been searching for articles and correcting the text in some of them. I also included some slides about Trove tags and lists in an upcoming presentation about "Cousin Bait". 

In my talk I will be showing people how to use tags as cousin bait and how to search for ancestor tags. I always try to tag posts about my ancestors. My search for my grandfather "Frank Duncan"brings back 65 results most of which are tags I attached to articles about Frank. 

I love lists on Trove. I use the CurryAus list to keep track of articles I find for my CurryAus surname study. I can add and edit notes to the items in the list. This is useful when I have added the details from an article to my database, I can keep track of articles I have not yet worked on. 

List result from a  simple Trove search for CurryAus

The results for lists show up on the main Trove results page, note that my blog is included under the Archived website category. 

Result for simple Trove search for CurryAus

One can also just search the lists. When I search Lists for Curry I found more than mine. Some of these lists directed me to articles I could add to my list.

Results for a Curry search in Trove Lists

Trove Tuesday - Titles and Tags

One of the things I bang on about is being able to find and retrieve things. It's no good having a great collection of stuff on the internet if it can't be easily retrieved or appear high on a list of hits from a search engine.

Today several geneabloggers have written wonderful Trove Tuesday posts. For these to be easily retrieved by others and to get high up on Google's results pages the term Trove Tuesday needs to appear in the post (and preferably not once just in the body of the articles we write).

I don't know much about the algorithms Google uses to return hits to us but I suspect that if Trove Tuesday appears in the title of a post then that post will rank higher in the list of hits returned to us. Similarly if a post is tagged with Trove Tuesday it might move higher up in the list of hits returned from a Trove Tuesday search on Google. So when I write a Trove Tuesday post I will put Trove Tuesday in the title, include the term in my post and add a tag for Trove Tuesday.

I just did a search for Trove Tuesday in Google and here is what I found:

You will notice that my two posts about Trove Tuesday are near the top after Shrove Tuesday (go figure). Maybe this is because I have mentioned the term three times. Merron's post makes the list further down. Where are the other fabulous posts?

Let's help to make Trove Tuesday posts more findable by adding appropriate Titles and Tags.

delicious blog » Good things just got better

delicious blog » Good things just got better

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Wordle Fun- What have I been writing about?

Using Wordle a tool to generate “word clouds” from text provided by the user I created a wordle for this blog. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.















Whilst it is good to see that the words family, tree, using and sources are prominent I would have liked to see Australia more prominently displayed in this Australian blog. When I look closely at the words displayed I suspect that Wordle has not created this word cloud from my whole blog but from the most recent posts displayed on the current front page.

I wonder what Wordles that other genie bloggers create would look like.

Library Thing

Library Thing is one of my favourite social networking sites where I keep a log of all the books I have read. The tag genealogy has been used 25,705 times by 2,176 users to describe relevant books on the LT database - it's a good place to go to find book details.

Delicious

I have been using Delicious to save and tag my bookmarks for a couple of years both in my personal and professional life. I find it very useful for keeping track of family history links. I recently set up a separate Delicious account just for my genealogy links. Geniaus' Delicious Links . Updates will be posted to this blog via an RSS Feed.