Mapping out my family tree
There's a pretty cool company/website that just launched called Geni. Geni lets you, in a fairly simple manner, map out your family tree. Its quite easy to use and some what addictive; its kinda fun mapping out relatives and I found time flew by while I was thinking about/adding family members. Perhaps the coolest thing about Geni is that it's viral; when you add relatives there's an option available to send them an email which lets them log in to the tree and add more relatives. I see this as an interesting option for two reasons.
1) I certainly don't know/don't know how to contact large swaths of my extended family and so having other people add people helps further the tree.
2) relating to #1, having a detailed map (with email addresses) of relatives is almost like having a family phone book. While I can't verify this as my tree hasn't been completely formed, I imagine such a tool would increase communication amongst family members, particularly extended family.
Now the goal becomes seeing how far I can extend my tree. I believe the Geni's founders goal is to map out the whole world, obviously quite ambitious, but that might not be as far fetched as it sounds. I've mentioned the highly viral/entertaining nature and that will certainly help the site grow (its also free, which doesn't hurt). It will be interesting to see what happens when trees begin to merge with one another.
where can we see it?
If you go to the website, geni.com. I think I emailed you/your mom the link to. If not, next time I’m over I’ll show you. I need more names from the Zork side of things though.